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2Dije Ktoer0tOe ^Literature Series 



SESAME AND LILIES 

BY 

JOHN BUSKIN 

1. OF KINGS' TREASURIES 

2. OF QUEENS' GARDENS 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 




HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

Boston : 4 Park Street ; New York : 11 East Seventeenth Street 
Chicago : 378-388 Wabash Avenue 

(OTbe Ifttasibe pre??, Cambn&oe 



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By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 



Library of Congress 

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JUL 9 1900 

Copyright entry 

SECOND COPY. 

Delivered to 

ORDER DIVISION, 

mi io 1900 



64905 

[Published by permission of Maynard, Merrill & Co., 
authorized American publishers of the works of John 
Ruskin.] 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. 



INTRODUCTION. 

John Buskin, the author of Sesame and Lilies, was 
an English writer, born February 8, 1819, and dying 
January 26, 1900, who had a two-fold influence on his 
generation. In 1843 he published the first volume of 
Modern Painters, by a Graduate of Oxford, which 
introduced to English readers and artists a critic of a 
new order, who broke many idols which his countrymen 
had worshipped, and set up in their place what he con- 
ceived to be true divinities in art. From that time until 
1860 he wrote industriously many books and articles 
relating to drawing, painting, architecture, and sculp- 
ture, and in that year brought to a conclusion his Mod- 
ern Painters by publishing the fifth volume. During 
this time he wrote also a separate brief treatise, Notes 
on the Construction of Sheepfolds, whose whimsical 
title misled persons who knew him as a writer on archi- 
tecture, until they read the book and found it a fervid 
inquiry into the scope of the Church ; but he did not 
merely gather into this book his theories, he was con- 
stantly interrupting his discourse on art by earnest in- 
quiries into religion and the conduct of life. Indeed, 
his critics complained that he insisted beyond reason in 
demanding a religious and moral basis for all art, and 
they complained that he allowed his personal judgment 
of the life of artists to color his judgment of their 
productions. 

At all events, in the entire body of this writing on 
art, there was a steady reference to standards of 



iv INTRODUCTION. 

righteousness. A significant illustration is to be found 
in one of his most famous books, The Seven Lamps, of 
Architecture, published in 1849, and the first book to 
bear the author's name on the title-page ; for the seven 
lamps under which the discussions on architecture were 
grouped were Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, 
Memory, and Obedience. 

It was not, therefore, so violent a change in his in- 
terests as superficial people were apt to judge, when 
in 1860, the year when he completed Modem Paint- 
ers, he published Unto this Last, a small book devoted 
to a passionate protest against prevailing doctrines in 
regard to political economy. He contended that the 
students of this science failed to conceive properly the 
most important factors in political economy, namely 
men and women themselves with all their capacity for 
pleasure and pain ; and as he regarded the existing 
social order, he cried out that laws and organizations 
were ignoring what was noble in humanity, setting up 
false standards, and assuming that men and women 
were to be regarded as mere machines. His fine sensi- 
bility, which had made him so delicate an interpreter 
of art, became, under the weight of his moral disappro- 
bation of the society about him, an exquisite torture 
to him. Like Hamlet in the play, he was ready to 
exclaim : — 

" The time is out of joint : O cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right ! " 

From this time forward, without absolutely aban- 
doning his work in art, though often the pain he suf- 
fered benumbed his power to enjoy the study and 
practice of art, he devoted himself largely to the in- 
culcation of doctrines tending to the change of social 
conditions. He maintained that only by a pretty radi- 



INTRODUCTION. V 

cal change could pure art become a natural and healthy 
element in English life. He confessed himself a dis- 
ciple of Thomas Carlyle, and not content with preach- 
ing, he exposed himself to the scorn of the idle and 
vapid by seeking deliberately to establish a society of 
English people who should by their lives, singly and 
jointly, illustrate and enforce the doctrines he preached. 
He gave almost the whole of the large fortune he had 
inherited and had increased by the sale of his writ- 
ings to carrying out his ideas. His society was styled 
St. George's Company ; he started a little community 
which should live according to the principles he advo- 
cated ; he established museums for the special aid of 
working-people ; he set up a shop here and there which 
should illustrate what he regarded as true methods of 
trade ; he encouraged home industri.es in weaving ; and 
in the sale of his own books he tried to enforce just 
and equal laws of business. 

When engaged in these many enterprises he printed 
and circulated month by month a series of Letters to 
the Workmen and Laborers of Great Britian under 
the enigmatic title Fors Clavigera, which Latin words 
he interpreted as Force, Fortitude, and Fortune, the 
Club-bearer, the Key-bearer, the Nail-bearer. In the 
same letter he summarized principles of conduct thus : 
" To do your own work well, whether it be for life or 
death ; to help other people at theirs, when you can, 
and seek to avenge no injury ; to be sure you can obey 
good laws before you seek to alter bad ones," — not 
an unsatisfactory group of rules. But though he had 
it in mind to write directly and forcibly to his fol- 
lowers, — Fors was in a way the organ of St. George's 
Company, — his fertile brain and his wide range of 
sympathy led him into the greatest variety of topics. 



vi INTRODUCTION. 

He recalled incidents in history, he criticised current 
views in political economy, he drew illustrations from 
art, translated stories from the French, analyzed litera- 
ture, especially Scott, published the accounts of St. 
George's Company, and indulged in satire, invective, 
humor, pathos, and much sad earnestness ; so that this 
series, running with some interruptions from 1871 to 
1884, bewildering as it often is to one who has not the 
key to Mr. Ruskin's wayward mind, is a treasure house 
of witty observation, penetrating judgment, and large 
induction. 

While the work was still going on, he began another 
series, in some ways the most priceless of the treasures 
he has left, — Prceterita ; Outlines of Scenes and 
Thoughts perhaps Worthy of Memory in my Past 
Life. This work, unhappily left unfinished, is not a 
formal autobiography, nor is it a desultory group of 
reminiscences, but a finely chosen succession of studies 
and memories of persons and other influences that 
helped to shape the order of his life. The narrative, 
when he discontinued it, had reached, however, his 
thirty -first year, so that one has in it a record of the 
most formative period of his life. Whatever biogra- 
phies may be written of him, none can possibly super- 
sede this incomparable confession. 

Ruskin laid aside Prceterita as he did the unfinished 
Fors and other projects, because he was overtaken by 
a malady which thereafter left him no clearness of 
mind and strength of purpose to carry forward the 
plans which his active brain had conceived. This was 
in 1887, and for the rest of his life he led a gentle, 
sheltered existence in his beloved Coniston, tenderly 
cared for. In his seclusion he could scarcely know that 
readers of his books were multiplying, and that the 
ideas he had so earnestly proclaimed were finding a 



INTRODUCTION. vii 

constantly increasing entrance into the minds of men, 
so that when he died there were great numbers in Eng- 
land and America who never had seen him, but who 
mourned his death as the loss of a guide and teacher. 
During the latter part of these silent years a book 
appeared which summed up his career, The Life and 
Work of John Rushin, by W. G. Collingwood. 

The Author's Preface to Sesame and Lilies inti- 
mates something of the regard with which Ruskm 
looked on the book. It is so eloquent and compact a 
presentation of some of his leading ideas that it is 
likely to be read oftener and to last longer, perhaps, 
than many of his more elaborate works. When the 
great change came over his mood, in or about 1860, 
he turned instinctively to the workingmen and to the 
young people of England, especially to girls, with 
whom individually his relations were most friendly 
and affectionate. He felt that the message he had 
to deliver would be most generously received by in- 
genuous youth, and, in spite of the sadness which 
pervaded much of his utterance, he had an inexpug- 
nable faith in the willingness of the young to receive 
and profit by those enduring lessons of life which 
he knew to be contained in great books ; he sought 
earnestly to impress upon them the truths which he 
himself had come to regard as most vital and impera- 
tive, and the strong counsel which this little book con- 
tains should be carefully heeded, since behind it is the 
character and life of a man who was a great prophet 
in his generation, for a prophet in the fullest meaning 
of the term is a man who not merely foretells, but 
forth tells the mind of God. 

H. E. S. 



AUTHOK'S PREFACE 

TO THE SMALL EDITION OF 1882. 

The present edition of Sesame and Lilies, issued 
at the request of an aged friend, is reprinted without 
change of a word from the first small edition of the 
book, withdrawing only the irrelevant preface respect- 
ing tours in the Alps, which, however, if the reader 
care to see, he will find placed with more propriety in 
the second volume of Deucalion. The third lecture, 
added in the first volume of the large edition of my 
works, and the gossiping introduction prefixed to that 
edition, are withdrawn also, not as irrelevant, but as 
following the subject too far, and disturbing the sim- 
plicity in which the two original lectures dwell on their 
several themes, — the majesty of the influence of good 
books, and of good women, if we know how to read 
them, and how to honor. 

I might just as well have said, the influence of good 
men, and good women, since the best strength of a 
man is shown in his intellectual work, as that of a 
woman in her daily deed and character ; and I am 
somewhat tempted to involve myself in the debate 
which might be imagined in illustrating these relations 
of their several powers, because only the other day 
one of my friends put me in no small pet by saying 
that he thought my own influence was much more in 
being amiable and obliging than in writing books. 
Admitting, for the argument's sake, the amiableness 



x AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 

and obligingness, I begged him, with some warmth, 
to observe that there were myriads of at least equally 
good-natured people in the world who had merely be- 
come its slaves, if not its victims, but that the influence 
of my books was distinctly on the increase, and I 
hoped — etc., etc. — it is no matter what more I said, 
or intimated ; but it much matters that the young 
reader of the following essays should be confirmed in 
the assurance on which all their pleading depends, 
that there is such a thing as essential good, and as 
essential evil, in books, in art, and in character ; — 
that this essential goodness and badness are independ- 
ent of epochs, fashions, opinions, or revolutions ; and 
that the present extremely active and ingenious gen- 
eration of young people, in thanking Providence for 
the advantages it has granted them in the possession 
of steam whistles and bicycles, need not hope materi- 
ally to add to the laws of beauty in sound or grace 
in motion, which were acknowledged in the days of 
Orpheus, and of Camilla. 

But I am brought to more serious pause than I had 
anticipated in putting final accent on the main sen- 
tences in this — already, as men now count time, old 
— book of mine, because since it was written, not only 
these untried instruments of action, but many equally 
novel methods of education and systems of morality 
have come into vogue, not without a certain measure 
of prospective good in them ; college education for 
women, — out-of -college education for men : positiv- 
ism with its religion of humanity, and negativism with 
its religion of Chaos, — and the like, from the entan- 
glement of which no young people can now escape, if 
they would ; together with a mass of realistic, or ma- 
terialistic, literature and art, founded mainly on the 



AUTHOR'S PREFACE. xi 

theory of nobody's having any will, or needing any 
master; much of it extremely clever, irresistibly 
amusing, and enticingly pathetic ; but which is all 
nevertheless the mere whirr and dust-cloud of a dis- 
solutely reforming and vulgarly manufacturing age, 
which when its dissolutions are appeased, and its 
manufactures purified, must return in due time to 
the understanding of the things that have been, and 
are, and shall be hereafter, though for the present 
concerned seriously with nothing beyond its dinner 
and its bed. 

I must therefore, for honesty's sake, no less than 
intelligibility's, warn the reader of Sesame and 
Lilies^ that the book is wholly of the old school ; that 
it ignores, without contention or regret, the ferment 
of surrounding elements, and assumes for perennial 
some old-fashioned conditions and existences which 
the philosophy of to-day imagines to be extinct with 
the Mammoth and the Dodo. 

Thus the second lecture, in its very title, " Queens' 
Gardens," takes for granted the persistency of Queen- 
ship, and therefore of Kingship, and therefore of 
Courtliness or Courtesy, and therefore of Uncourtli- 
ness or Rusticity. It assumes, with the ideas of 
higher and lower rank, those of serene authority and 
happy submission ; of Eiches and Poverty without 
dispute for their rights, and of Virtue and Vice with- 
out confusion of their natures. 

And farther, it must be premised that the book 
is chiefly written for young people belonging to the 
upper, or undistressed middle, classes ; who may be 
supposed to have choice of the objects and command 
of the industries of their life. It assumes that many 
of them will be called to occupy responsible positions 



xii AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 

in the world, and that they have leisure, in preparation 
for these, to play tennis, or to read Plato. 

Therefore also — that they have Plato to read if 
they choose, with lawns on which they may run, and 
woods in which they may muse. It supposes their 
father's library to be open to them, and to contain all 
that is necessary for their intellectual progress, with- 
out the smallest dependence on monthly parcels from 
town. 

These presupposed conditions are not extravagant 
in a country which boasts of its wealth, and which, 
without boasting, still presents in the greater number 
of its landed households, the most perfect types of 
grace and peace which can be found in Europe. 

I have only to add farther, respecting the book, 
that it was written while my energies were still un- 
broken and my temper unfettered ; and that, if read 
in connection with Unto this Last, it contains the 
chief truths I have endeavored through all my past 
life to display, and which, under the warnings I have 
received to prepare for its close, I am chiefly thankful 
to have learnt and taught. 

Avallon, A ugust 24:th, 1882. 



SESAME AND LILIES. 



LECTURE I.— SESAME. 
OF kings' treasuries. 

" You shall each have a cake of sesame, — and ten pound. " 

Lucian : The Fisherman. 

1. My first duty this evening is to ask your pardon 
for the ambiguity of title under which the subject of 
lecture has been announced : for indeed I am not 
going to talk of kings, known as regnant, nor of 
treasuries, understood to contain wealth ; but of quite 
another order of royalty, and another material of 
riches, than those usually acknowledged. I had even 
intended to ask your attention for a little while on 
trust, and (as sometimes one contrives, in taking a 
friend to see a favorite piece of scenery) to hide what 
I wanted most to show, with such imperfect cunning 
as I might, until we unexpectedly reached the best 
point of view by winding paths. But — and as also 
I have heard it said, by men practised in public ad- 
dress, that hearers are never so much fatigued as by 
the endeavor to follow a speaker who gives them no 
clue to his purpose — I will take the slight mask off 
at once, and tell you plainly that I want to speak to 
you about the treasures hidden in books ; and about 
the way we find them, and the way we lose them. A 



2 SESAME AND LILIES. 

grave subject, you will say ; and a wide one ! Yes ; 
so wide that I shall make no effort to touch the com- 
pass of it. I will try only to bring before you a few 
simple thoughts about reading, which press themselves 
upon me every day more deeply, as I watch the course 
of the public mind with respect to our daily enlarging 
means of education ; and the answeringly wider spread- 
ing on the levels, of the irrigation of literature. 

2. It happens that I have practically some connec- 
tion with schools for different classes of youth ; and 
I receive many letters from parents respecting the 
education of their children. In the mass of these 
letters I am always struck by the precedence which 
the idea of a " position in life " takes above all other 
thoughts in the parents' — more especially in the 
mothers' — minds. " The education befitting such 
and such a station in life" x — this is the phrase, this 
the object, always. They never seek, as far as I can 
make out, an education good in itself ; even the con- 
ception of abstract rightness in training rarely seems 
reached by the writers. But, an education " which 
shall keep a good coat on my son's back; — which 
shall enable him to ring with confidence the visitors' 
bell at double-belled doors ; which shall result ulti- 
mately in the establishment of a double-belled door to 
his own house ; — in a word, which shall lead to ad- 
vancement in life ; — this we pray for on bent knees 
— and this is all we pray for." It never seems to 
occur to the parents that there may be an education 
which, in itself, is advancement in Life ; — that any 

[ l The phrase would be a specially familiar one to an English 
mind because of the sentence in the Catechism of the Church of 
England, "To do my duty in that state of life unto which it 
shall please God to call me." ] 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 3 

other than that may perhaps be advancement in 
Death ; and that this essential education might be 
more easily got, or given, than they fancy, if they set 
about it in the right way ; while it is for no price, and 
by no favor, to be got, if they set about it in the wrong. 

3. Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and 
effective in the mind of this busiest of countries, I 
suppose the first — at least that which is confessed 
with the greatest frankness, and put forward as the 
fittest stimulus to youthful exertion — is this of " Ad- 
vancement in life." May I ask you to consider with 
me, what this idea practically includes, and what it 
should include ? 

Practically, then, at present, " advancement in life " 
means, becoming conspicuous in life ; obtaining a 
position which shall be acknowledged by others to 
be respectable or honorable. We do not understand 
by this advancement, in general, the mere making of 
money, but the being known to have made it ; not the 
accomplishment of any great aim, but the being seen 
to have accomplished it. In a word, we mean the 
gratification of our thirst for applause. That thirst, 
if the last infirmity of noble minds, 1 is also the first 
infirmity of weak ones ; and on the whole, the strong- 
est impulsive influence of average humanity : the 
greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable 
to the love of praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the 
love of pleasure. 

4. I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. 
I want you only to feel how it lies at the root of 
effort ; especially of all modern effort. It is the grati- 
fication of vanity which is, with us, the stimulus of 
toil and balm of repose ; so closely does it touch the 

[ l See Milton's Lycidas, line 71.] 



4 SESAME AND LILIES. 

very springs of life that the wounding of our vanity 
is always spoken of (and truly) as in its measure 
mortal; we call it " mortification," using the same 
expression which we should apply to a gangrenous 
and incurable bodily hurt. And although few of us 
may be physicians enough to recognize the various 
effect of this passion upon health and energy, I believe 
most honest men know, and would at once acknow- 
ledge, its leading power with them as a motive. The 
seaman does not commonly desire to be made captain 
only because he knows he can manage the ship better 
than any other sailor on board. He wants to be 
made captain that he may be called captain. The 
clergyman does not usually want to be made a bishop 
only because he believes that no other hand can, as 
firmly as his, direct the diocese through its difficulties. 
He wants to be made bishop primarily that he may 
be called " My Lord." And a prince does not usually 
desire to enlarge, or a subject to gain, a kingdom, 
because he believes that no one else can as well 
serve the State, upon its throne ; but, briefly, because 
he wishes to be addressed as "Your Majesty," by as 
many lips as may be brought to such utterance. 

5. This, then, being the main idea of "advance- 
ment in life," the force of it applies, for all of us, ac- 
cording to our station, particularly to that secondary 
result of such advancement which we call " getting 
into good society." We want to get into good society 
not that we may have it, but that we may be seen in 
it ; and our notion of its goodness depends primarily 
on its conspicuousness. 

Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to 
put what I fear you may think an impertinent ques- 
tion? I never can go on with an address unless I 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 5 

feel, or know, that my audience are either with me or 
against me : I do not much care which, in beginning ; 
but I must know where they are ; and I would fain 
find out, at this instant, whether you think I am 
putting the motives of popular action too low. I 
am resolved, to-night, to state them low enough to be 
admitted as probable ; for whenever, in my writings 
on Political Economy, I assume that a little honesty, 
or generosity — or what used to be called "virtue" 

— may be calculated upon as a human motive of 
action, people always answer me, saying, " You must 
not calculate on that : that is not in human nature : 
you must not assume anything to be common to men 
but acquisitiveness and jealousy ; no other feeling 
ever has influence on them, except accidentally, and in 
matters out of the way of business." I begin, ac- 
cordingly, to-night low in the scale of motives ; but I 
must know if you think me right in doing so. There- 
fore, let me ask those who admit the love of praise to 
be usually the strongest motive in men's minds in 
seeking advancement, and the honest desire of doing 
any kind of duty to be an entirely secondary one, to 
hold up their hands. (About a dozen hands held up 

— the audience, partly, not being sure the lecturer is 
serious, and, partly, shy of expressing opinion.} I 
am quite serious — I really do want to know what 
you think ; however, I can judge by putting the 
reverse question. Will those who think that duty 
is generally the first, and love of praise the second, 
motive, hold up their hands ? ( One hand reported to 
have been held up, behind the lecturer.} Very good: 
I see you are with me, and that you think I have not 
begun too near the ground. Now, without teasing 
you by putting farther question, I venture to assume 



6 SESAME AND LILIES. 

that you will admit duty as at least a secondary or 
tertiary motive. You think that the desire of doing 
something useful, or obtaining some real good, is in- 
deed an existent collateral idea, though a secondary 
one, in most men's desire of advancement. You will 
grant that moderately honest men desire place and 
office, at least in some measure, for the sake of bene- 
ficent power ; and would wish to associate rather with 
sensible and well-informed persons than with fools 
and ignorant persons, whether they are seen in the 
company of the sensible ones or not. And finally, 
without being troubled by repetition of any common 
truisms about the preciousness of friends, and the 
influence of companions, you will admit, doubtless, 
that according to the sincerity of our desire that our 
friends may be true, and our companions wise, — and 
in proportion to the earnestness and discretion with 
which we choose both, — will be the general chances of 
our happiness and usfulness. 

6. But granting that we had both the will and the 
sense to choose our friends well, how few of us have 
the power ! or, at least, how limited, for most, is the 
sphere of choice ! Nearly all our associations are 
determined by chance, or necessity ; and restricted 
within a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we 
would ; and those whom we know, we cannot have at 
our side when we most need them. All the higher 
circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, 
only momentarily and partially open. We may, by 
good fortune, obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and 
hear the sound of his voice ; or put a question to a 
man of science, and be answered good humoredly. We 
may intrude ten minutes' talk on a cabinet minister, 
answered probably with words worse than silence, being 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 7 

deceptive ; or snatch, once or twice in our lives, the 
privilege of throwing a bouquet in the path of a prin- 
cess, or arresting the kind glance of a queen. And 
yet these momentary chances we covet ; and spend our 
years, and passions, and powers in pursuit of little 
more than these ; while, meantime, there is a society, 
continually open to us, of people who will talk to us 
as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation ; 
— talk to us in the best words they can choose, and 
of the things nearest their hearts. And this society, 
because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can be 
kept waiting round us all day long, — kings and 
statesmen lingering patiently, not to grant audience, 
but to gain it ! — in those plainly furnished and nar- 
row anterooms, our bookcase shelves, — we make no 
account of that company, — perhaps never listen to a 
word they would say, all day long ! 

7. You may tell me, perhaps, or think within your- 
selves, that the apathy with which we regard this com- 
pany of the noble, who are praying us to listen to 
them ; and the passion with which we pursue the com- 
pany, probably of the ignoble, who despise us, or who 
have nothing to teach us, are grounded in this, — 
that we can see the faces of the living men, and it is 
themselves, and not their sayings, with which we 
desire to become familiar. But it is not so. Sup- 
pose you never were to see their faces : — suppose 
you could be put behind a screen in the statesman's 
cabinet, or the prince's chamber, would you not be 
glad to listen to their words, though you were forbid- 
den to advance beyond the screen? And when the 
screen is only a little less, folded in two instead of 
four, and you can be hidden behind the cover of the 
two boards that bind a book, and listen all day long, 



8 SESAME AND LILIES. 

not to the casual talk, but to the studied, determined, 
chosen addresses of the wisest of men ; — this station 
of audience, and honorable privy council, you despise ! 

8. But perhaps you will say that it is because the 
living people talk of things that are passing, and are 
of immediate interest to you, that you desire to hear 
them. Nay ; that cannot be so, for the living people 
will themselves tell you about passing matters, much 
better in their writings than in their careless talk. 
But I admit that this motive does influence you, so 
far as you prefer those rapid and ephemeral writings 
to slow and enduring writings — books, properly so 
called. For all books are divisible into two classes : 
the books of the hour, and the books of all time. 
Mark this distinction — it is not one of quality only. 
It is not merely the bad book that does not last, and 
the good one that does. It is a distinction of species. 
There are good books for the hour, and good ones for 
all time ; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for 
all time. I must define the two kinds before I go 
farther. 

9. The good book of the hour, then, — I do not 
speak of the bad ones, — is simply the useful or plea- 
sant talk of some person whom you cannot otherwise 
converse with, printed for you. Very useful often, 
telling you what you need to know ; very pleasant 
often, as a sensible friend's present talk would be. 
These bright accounts of travels ; good-humored and 
witty discussions of question ; lively or pathetic story- 
telling in the form of novel ; firm fact-telling, by the 
real agents concerned in the events of passing his- 
tory; — all these books of the hour, multiplying 
among us as education becomes more general, are a 
peculiar possession of the present age : we ought to 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 9 

be entirely thankful for them, and entirely ashamed 
of ourselves if we make no good use of them. But 
we make the worst possible use if we allow them to 
usurp the place of true books : for, strictly speaking, 
they are not books at all, but merely letters or news- 
papers in good print. Our friend's letter may be 
delightful, or necessary, to-day : whether worth keep- 
ing or not, is to be considered. The newspaper may 
be entirely proper at breakfast-time, but assuredly it 
is not reading for all day. So, though bound up in a 
volume, the long letter which gives you so pleasant 
an account of the inns, and roads, and weather last 
year at such a place, or which tells you that amusing 
story, or gives you the real circumstances of such and 
such events, however valuable for occasional refer- 
ence, may not be, in the real sense of the word, a 
" book " at all, nor in the real sense, to be " read." 
A book is essentially not a talked thing, but a written 
thing ; and written not with a view of mere commu- 
nication, but of permanence. The book of talk is 
printed only because its author cannot speak to thou- 
sands of people at once ; if he could, he would — the 
volume is mere multiplication of his voice. You can- 
not talk to your friend in India ; if you could, you 
would ; you write instead : that is mere conveyance 
of voice. But a book is written, not to multiply the 
voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate 
it. The author has something to say which he per- 
ceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. 
So far as he knows, no one has yet said it ; so far 
as he knows, no one else can say it. He is bound 
to say it, clearly and melodiously if he may ; clearly, 
at all events. In the sum of his life he finds this 
to be the thing, or group of things, manifest to him ; 



10 SESAME AND LILIES. 

— this, the piece of true knowledge, or sight, which 
his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to 
seize. He would fain set it down forever ; engrave 
it on rock, if he could ; saying, " This is the best of 
me ; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved 
and hated, like another ; my life was as the vapor, 
and is not ; but this I saw and knew : this if any- 
thing of mine, is worth your memory." That is his 
" writing ; " it is, in his small human way, and with 
whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, his 
inscription, or scripture. That is a " Book." 

10. Perhaps you think no books were ever so writ- 
ten? 

But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in hon- 
esty, or at all in kindness ? or do you think there is 
never any honesty or benevolence in wise people? 
None of us, I hope, are so unhappy as to think that. 
Well, whatever bit of a wise man's work is honestly 
and benevolently done, that bit is his book, or his 
piece of art. 1 It is mixed always with evil fragments 

— ill-done, redundant, affected work. But if you read 
rightly, you will easily discover the true bits, and 
those are the book. 

1 Note this sentence carefully, and compare The Queen of the 
Air, § 106, [as follows] : Thus far of Abbeville building. Now 
I have here asserted two things, — first, the foundation of art in 
moral character ; next, the foundation of moral character in war. 
I must make both these assertions clearer, and prove them. 
First, of the foundation of art in moral character. Of course, 
art-gift and amiability of disposition are two different things; a 
good man is not necessarily a painter, nor does an eye for color 
necessarily imply an honest mind. But great art implies the 
union of both powers: it is the expression, by an art-gift, of a 
pure soul. If the gift is not there, we can have no art at all; 
and if the soul — and a right soul too — is not there, the art is 
bad, however dexterous. 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 11 

11. Now, books of this kind have been written in 
all ages by their greatest men, — by great readers, 
great statesmen, and great thinkers. These are all 
at your choice ; and Life is short. You have heard as 
much before ; — yet, have you measured and mapped 
out this short life and its possibilities ? Do you know, 
if you read this, that you cannot read that — that 
what you lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow ? 
Will you go and gossip with your housemaid, or 
your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and 
kings ; or flatter yourselves that it is with any worthy 
consciousness of your own claims to respect, that you 
jostle with the hungry and common crowd for entree 
here, and audience there, when all the while this eter- 
nal court is open to you, with its society, wide as the 
world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, and the 
mighty, of every place and time ? Into that you may 
enter always; in that you may take fellowship and 
rank according to your wish ; from that, once entered 
into it, you can never be an outcast but by your own 
fault; by your aristocracy of companionship there, 
your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, 
and the motives with which you strive to take high 
place in the society of the living, measured, as to all 
the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place 
you desire to take in this company of the Dead. 

12. "The place you desire," and the place you fit 
yourself for, I must also say ; because, observe, this 
court of the past differs from all living aristocracy in 
this : — it is open to labor and to merit, but to nothing 
else. No wealth will bribe, no name overawe, no 
artifice deceive, the guardian of those Elysian gates. 
In the deep sense, no vile or vulgar person ever enters 
there. At the portieres of that silent Faubourg St. 



12 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Germain, 1 there is but brief question : " Do you de- 
serve to enter ? Pass. Do you ask to be the com- 
panion of nobles? Make yourself noble, and you 
shall be. Do you long for the conversation of the 
wise ? Learn to understand it, and you shall hear 
it. But on other terms ? — no. If you will not rise 
to us, we cannot stoop to you. The living lord may 
assume courtesy, the living philosopher explain his 
thought to you with considerate pain ; but here we 
neither feign nor interpret ; you must rise to the level 
of our thoughts if you would be gladdened by them, 
and share our feelings if you would recognize our 
presence." 

13. This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit 
that it is much. You must, in a word, love these 
people, if you are to be among them. No ambition is 
of any use. They scorn your ambition. You must 
love them, and show your love in these two following 
ways. 

1. — First, by a true desire to be taught by them, 
and to enter into their thoughts. To enter into theirs, 
observe ; not to find your own expressed by them. If 
the person who wrote the book is not wiser than you, 
you need not read it ; if he be, he will think differ- 
ently from you in many respects. 

Very ready we are to say of a book, " How good 
this is — that's exactly what I think!" But the 
right feeling is, " How strange that is ! I never 
thought of that before, and yet I see it is true ; or if 
I do not now, I hope I shall, some day." But whether 
thus submissively or not, at least be sure that you go 
to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. 

[ 1 The Faubourg St. Germain in Paris is the quarter where 
the old nobility of France has its most conspicuous residence.] 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 13 

Judge it afterwards if you think yourself qualified to 
do so ; but ascertain it first. And be sure also, if 
the author is worth anything, that you will not get at 
his meaning all at once ; — nay, that at his whole 
meaning you will not for a long time arrive in any 
wise. Not that he does not say what he means, and 
in strong words too; but he cannot say it all; and 
what is more strange, will not, but in a hidden way 
and in parable, in order that he may be sure you 
want it. I cannot quite see the reason of this, nor 
analyze that cruel reticence in the breasts of wise men 
which makes them always hide their deeper thought. 1 
They do not give it you by way of help, but of re- 
ward ; and will make themselves sure that you deserve 
it before they allow you to reach it. But it is the 
same with the physical type of wisdom, gold. There 
seems, to you and me, no reason why the electric 
forces of the earth should not carry whatever there is 
of gold within it at once to the mountain tops, so that 
kings and people might know that all the gold they 
could get was there ; and without any trouble of dig- 
ging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it 
away, and coin as much as they needed. But Nature 
does not manage it so. She puts it in little fissures 
in the earth, nobody knows where ; you may dig long 
and find none ; you must dig painfully to find any. 

14. And it is just the same with men's best wis- 
dom. When you come to a good book, you must ask 
yourself, "Am I inclined to work as an Australian 
miner would ? Are my pickaxes and shovels in good 
order, and am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well 
up to the elbow, and my breath good, and my tem- 
per?" And, keeping the figure a little longer, even 
[ l See Matthew xiii. 10-13.] 



14 SESAME AND LILIES. 

at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly useful 
one, the metal you are in search of being the author's 
mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which 
you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. 
And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learn- 
ing; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful 
soul. Do not hope to get at any good author's mean- 
ing without those tools and that fire ; often you will 
need sharpest, finest chiselling, and patientest fusing, 
before you can gather one grain of the metal. 

15. And, therefore, first of all, I tell you earnestly 
and authoritatively (I know I am right in this), you 
must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, 
and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by 
syllable — nay, letter by letter. For though it is only 
by reason of the opposition of letters in the *f unction 
of signs, to sounds in the function of signs, that the 
study of books is called " literature," and that a man 
versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, a 
man of letters instead of a man of books, or of words, 
you may yet connect with that accidental nomencla- 
ture this real fact, — that you might read all the 
books in the British Museum (if you could live long 
enough), and remain an utterly "illiterate," unedu- 
cated person ; but that if you read ten pages of a 
good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real 
accuracy, — you are f orevermore in some measure 
an educated person. The entire difference between 
education and non-education (as regards the merely 
intellectual part of it) consists in this accuracy. A 
well-educated gentleman may not know many lan- 
guages, — may not be able to speak: any but his own, 
— may have read very few books. But whatever 
language he knows, he knows precisely ; whatever 



/. OF KINGS 9 TREASURIES. 15 

word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly ; above 
all, he is learned in the peerage of words ; knows the 
words of true descent and ancient blood, at a glance, 
from words of modern canaille ; remembers all their 
ancestry, their intermarriages, distant relationships, 
and the extent to which they were admitted, and 
offices they held, among the national noblesse of 
words at any time, and in any country. But an un- 
educated person may know, by memory, many lan- 
guages, and talk them all, and yet truly know not a 
word of any, — not a word even of his own. An 
ordinarily clever and sensible seaman will be able to 
make his way ashore at most ports ; yet he has only 
to speak a sentence of any language to be known for 
an illiterate person ; so also the accent, or turn of 
expression of a single sentence, will at once mark a 
scholar. And this is so strongly felt, so conclusively 
admitted, by educated persons, that a false accent or 
a mistaken syllable is enough, in the parliament of 
any civilized nation, to assign to a man a certain 
degree of inferior standing forever. 

16. And this is right ; but it is a pity that the ac- 
curacy insisted on is not greater, and required to a 
serious purpose. It is right that a false Latin quan- 
tity should excite a smile in the House of Commons ; 
but it is wrong that a false English meaning should 
not exfcite a frown there. Let the accent of words be 
watched, and closely; let their meaning be watched 
more closely still, and fewer will do the work. A few 
words, well chosen and distinguished, will do work 
that a thousand cannot, when every one is acting, 
equivocally, in the function of another. Yes ; and 
words, if they are not watched, will do deadly work 
sometimes. There are masked words droning and 



16 SESAME AND LILIES. 

skulking about us in Europe just now — (there never 
were so many, owing to the spread of a shallow, blotch- 
ing, blundering, infectious "information," or rather 
deformation, everywhere, and to the teaching of cate- 
chisms and phrases at schools instead of human mean- 
ings) — there are masked words abroad, I say, which 
nobody understands, but which everybody uses, and 
most people will also fight for, live for, or even die 
for, fancying they mean this or that, or the other, of 
things dear to them : for such words wear chameleon 
cloaks — " ground-lion " cloaks, of the color of the 
ground of any man's fancy : on that ground they lie 
in wait, and rend him with a spring from it. There 
never were creatures of prey so mischievous, never 
diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, as 
these masked words ; they are the unjust stewards of 
all men's ideas : whatever fancy or favorite instinct a 
man most cherishes, he gives to his favorite masked 
word to take care of for him ; the word at last comes 
to have an infinite power over him, — you cannot get 
at him but by its ministry. 

17. And in languages so mongrel in breed as the 
English, there is a fatal power of equivocation put 
into men's hands, almost whether they will or no, in 
being able to use Greek or Latin words for an idea 
when they want it to be awful ; and Saxon or other- 
wise common words when they want it to be Vulgar. 
What a singular and salutary effect, for instance, 
would be produced on the minds of people who are in 
the habit of taking the Form of the " Word " they 
live by, for the Power of which that Word tells them, 
if we always either retained, or refused, the Greek 
form " biblos," or " biblion," as the right expression 
for " book " — instead of employing it only in the 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 17 

one instance in which we wish to give dignity to the 
idea, and translating it into English everywhere else. 
How wholesome it would be for many simple persons 
if, in such places (for instance) as Acts xix. 19, we re- 
tained the Greek expression, instead of translating it, 
and they had to read — " Many of them also which 
used curious arts, brought their bibles together, and 
burnt them before all men ; and they counted the 
price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of 
silver " ! Or if, on the other hand, we translated 
where we retain it, and always spoke of " the Holy 
Book," instead of " Holy Bible," it might come into 
more heads than it does at present, that the Word of 
God, by which the heavens were, of old, and by which 
they are now kept in store, 1 cannot be made a present 
of to anybody in morocco binding, nor sown on any 
wayside by help either of steam plough or steam press ; 
but is nevertheless being offered to us daily, and by 
us with contumely refused ; and sown in us daily, and 
by us, as instantly as may be, choked. 

18. So, again, consider what effect has been pro- 
duced on the English vulgar mind by the use of the 
sonorous Latin form u damno," in translating the 
Greek /cara/cptVw, when people charitably wish to make 
it forcible ; and the substitution of the temperate 
" condemn " for it, when they choose to keep it gentle ; 
and what notable sermons have been preached by 
illiterate clergymen on — " He that belie veth not shall 
be damned ;" though they would shrink with horror 
from translating Heb. xi. 7, " The saving of his house, 
by which he damned the world," or John viii. 10-11, 
" Woman, hath no man damned thee? She saith, No 
man, Lord. Jesus answered her, Neither do I damn 
1 2 Peter hi. 5-7. 



18 SESAME AND LILIES. 

thee : go, and sin no more." And divisions in the 
mind of Europe, which have cost seas of blood, and in 
the defence of which the noblest souls of men have 
been cast away in frantic desolation, countless as 
forest leaves, — though, in the heart of them, founded 
on deeper causes, — have nevertheless been rendered 
practically possible, mainly, by the European adoption 
of the Greek word for a public meeting, " ecclesia," to 
give peculiar respectability to such meetings, when 
held for religious purposes ; and other collateral equi- 
vocations, such as the vulgar English one of using the 
word " priest " as a contraction for " presbyter." 

19. Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this 
is the habit you must form. Nearly every word in 
your language has been first a word of some other 
language — of Saxon, German, French, Latin, or 
Greek (not to speak of Eastern and primitive dia- 
lects). And many words have been all these; — 
that is to say, have been Greek first, Latin next, 
French or German next, and English last: under- 
going a certain change of sense and use on the lips 
of each nation ; but retaining a deep vital meaning, 
which all good scholars feel in employing them, even 
at this day. If you do not know the Greek alphabet, 
learn it ; young or old — girl or boy — whoever you 
may be, if you think of reading seriously (which, of 
course, implies that you have some leisure at com- 
mand), learn your Greek alphabet ; then get good 
dictionaries of all these languages, and whenever you 
are in doubt about a word, hunt it down patiently. 
Eead Max Miiller's lectures thoroughly, 1 to begin 
with; and, after that, never let a word escape you 

[ x For American readers there is a convenient book in Rich- 
ard Grant White's Words and their Uses.'] 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 19 

that looks suspicious. It is severe work ; but you 
will find it, even at first, interesting, and at last, 
endlessly amusing. And the general gain to your 
character, in power and precision, will be quite in- 
calculable. 

Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to 
know, Greek, or Latin, or French. It takes a whole 
life to learn any language perfectly. But you can 
easily ascertain the meanings through which the 
English word has passed ; and those which in a good 
writer's work it must still bear. 

20. And now, merely for example's sake, I will, 
with your permission, read a few lines of a true book 
with you carefully; and see what will come out of 
them. I will take a book perfectly known to you all. 
No English words are more familiar to us, yet few 
perhaps have been read with less sincerity. I will 
take these few following lines of Lycidas. 

" Last came, and last did go, 

The Pilot of the Galilean lake. 

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain 

(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain). 

He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake : — 
6 How well could I have spared for thee, young swain, 

A now of such as, for their bellies , sake, 

Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold ! 

Of other care they little reckoning make 

Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 

And shove away the worthy bidden guest. 

Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold 

A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least 

That to the faithful Herdman's art belongs ! 

What recks it them ? What need they ? They are sped; 

And when they list, their lean and flashy songs 

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw; 

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 



20 SESAME AND LILIES. 

But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw, 
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; 
Besides what the grim Wolf with privy paw 
Daily devours apace, and nothing said.' " 

Let us think over this passage, and examine its 
words. 

First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning to 
St. Peter, not only his full episcopal function, but 
the very types of it which Protestants usually refuse 
most passionately? His "mitred" locks! Milton 
was no bishop-lover ; how comes St. Peter to be 
" mitred " ? " Two massy keys he bore." Is this, 
then, the power of the keys claimed by the Bishops 
of Rome, and is it acknowledged here by Milton only 
in a poetical license, for the sake of its picturesque- 
ness, that he may get the gleam of the golden keys to 
help his effect? 

Do not think it. Great men do not play stage 
tricks with the doctrines of life and death : only little 
men do that. Milton means what he says; and 
means it with his might too — is going to put the 
whole strength of his spirit presently into the saying 
of it. For though not a lover of false bishops, he 
was a lover of true ones ; and the Lake-pilot is here, 
in his thoughts, the type and head of true episcopal 
power. For Milton reads that text, " I will give unto 
thee the keys of the kingdom of Heaven," quite hon- 
estly. Puritan though he be, he would not blot it out 
of the book because there have been bad bishops ; 
nay, in order to understand Aim, we must understand 
that verse first ; it will not do to eye it askance, or 
whisper it under our breath, as if it were a weapon of 
an adverse sect. It is a solemn, universal assertion, 
deeply to be kept in mind by all sects. But perhaps 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 21 

we shall be better able to reason on it if we go on a 
little farther, and come back to it. For clearly this 
marked insistence on the power of the true episcopate 
is to make us feel more weightily what is to be charged 
against the false claimants of episcopate ; or generally, 
against false claimants of power and rank in the 
body of the clergy : they who, " for their bellies' sake, 
creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold." 

21. Never think Milton uses those three words to 
fill up his verse, as a loose writer would. He needs 
all the three ; — specially those three, and no more 
than those — " creep," and " intrude," and " climb ; " 
no other words would or could serve the turn, and 
no more could be added. For they exhaustively com- 
prehend the three classes, correspondent to the three 
characters, of men who dishonestly seek ecclesiastical 
power. First, those who " creep " into the fold ; who 
do not care for office, nor name, but for secret influ- 
ence, and do all things occultly and cunningly, con- 
senting to any servility of office or conduct, so only 
that they may intimately discern, and unawares direct, 
the minds of men. Then those who " intrude " (thrust, 
that is) themselves into the fold, who by natural inso- 
lence of heart, and stout eloquence of tongue, and 
fearlessly perseveranfc self-assertion, obtain hearing 
and authority with the common crowd. Lastly, those 
who " climb," who, by labor and learning, both stout 
and sound, but selfishly exerted in the cause of their 
own ambition, gain high dignities and authorities, 
and become "lords over the heritage," though not 
"ensamples to the flock." 

22. Now go on : — 

" Of other care they little reckoning make, 
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast. 

Blind mouths " — 



22 SESAME AND LILIES. 

I pause again, for this is a strange expression : a 
broken metaphor, one might think, careless and un- 
scholarly. 

Not so ; its very audacity and pithiness are intended 
to make us look close at the phrase and remember it. 
Those two monosyllables express the precisely accurate 
contraries of right character, in the two great offices of 
the Church — those of bishop and pastor. 

A " Bishop " means " a person who sees." 

A " Pastor " means " a person who feeds." 

The most unbishoply character a man can have is 
therefore to be Blind. 

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want 
to be fed, ■ — to be a Mouth. 

Take the two reverses together, and you have " blind 
mouths." We may advisably follow out this idea a 
little. Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen 
from bishops desiring power more than light. They 
want authority, not outlook. Whereas their real office 
is not to rule : though it may be vigorously to exhort 
and rebuke ; it is the king's office to rule ; the bishop's 
office is to oversee the flock ; to number it, sheep by 
sheep ; to be ready always to give full account of it. 
Now, it is clear he cannot give account of the souls, 
if he has not so much as numbered the bodies of his 
flock. The first thing, therefore, that a bishop has to 
do is at least to put himself in a position in which, at 
any moment, he can obtain the history, from child- 
hood, of every living soul in his diocese, and of its 
present state. Down in that back street, Bill and 
Nancy, knocking each other's teeth out ! — Does the 
bishop know all about it ? Has he his eye upon them ? 
Has he had his eye upon them ? Can he circumstan- 
tially explain to us how Bill got into the habit of beat- 



J. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 23 

ing Nancy about the head ? If he cannot, he is no 
bishop, though he had a mitre as high as Salisbury 
steeple ; he is no bishop, — he has sought to be at the 
helm instead of the mast-head; he has no sight of 
things. " Nay," you say, " it is not his duty to look 
after Bill in the back street." What ! the fat sheep 
that have full fleeces — you think it is only those he 
should look after, while (go back to your Milton) 
" the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, besides 
what the grim Wolf, with privy paw " (bishops knowing 
nothing about it), " daily devours apace, and nothing 
said"? 

" But that 's not our idea of a bishop." 1 Perhaps 
not ; but it was St. Paul's ; and it was Milton's. They 
may be right, or we may be ; but we must not think 
we are reading either one or the other by putting our 
meaning into their words. 

23. I go on. 

" But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw." 

This is to meet the vulgar answer that " if the poor 
are not looked after in their bodies, they are in their 
souls ; they have spiritual food." 

And Milton says, " They have no such thing as 
spiritual food ; they are only swollen with wind." At 
first you may think that is a coarse type, and an ob- 
scure one. But again, it is a quite literally accurate 
one. Take up your Latin and Greek dictionaries, and 
find out the meaning of " Spirit." It is only a con- 
traction of the Latin word " breath," and an indistinct 
translation of the Greek word for " wind." The same 
word is used in writing, " The wind bloweth where it 
listeth ; " and in writing, " So is every one that is born 

1 Compare the 13th Letter in Time and Tide. 



24 SESAME AND LILIES. 

of the Spirit ; " born of the breath, that is ; for it means 
the breath of God, in soul and body. We have the 
true sense of it in our words " inspiration " and " ex- 
pire." Now, there are two kinds of breath with which 
the flock may be filled ; God's breath and man's. The 
breath of God is health, and life, and peace to them, 
as the air of heaven is to the flocks on the hills ; but 
man's breath — the word which he calls spiritual — is 
disease and contagion to them, as the fog of the fen. 
They rot inwardly with it ; they are puffed up by it, 
as a dead body by the vapors of its own decomposition. 
This is literally true of all false religious teaching ; the 
first, and last, and fatalest sign of it is that " puffing 
up." Your converted children, who teach their par- 
ents ; your converted convicts, who teach honest men ; 
your converted dunces, who, having lived in cretinous 
stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awaking to the 
fact of there being a God, fancy themselves therefore 
his peculiar people and messengers ; your sectarians 
of every species, small and great, Catholic or Protest- 
ant, of high church or low, in so far as they think 
themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong ; 
and preeminently, in every sect, those who hold that 
men can be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing 
rightly, by work instead of act, and wish instead of 
work ; — these are the true fog children — clouds, 
these, without water ; bodies, these, of putrescent 
vapor and skin, without blood or flesh : blown bag- 
pipes for the fiends to pipe with — corrupt, and cor- 
rupting — " Swoln with wind and the rank mist they 
draw." 

24. Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the 
power of the keys, for now we can understand them. 
Note the difference between Milton and Dante in their 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 25 

interpretation of this power ; for once, the latter is 
weaker in thought ; he supposes both the keys to be 
of the gate of heaven ; one is of gold, the other of 
silver : they are given by St. Peter to the sentinel 
angel ; and it is not easy to determine the meaning 
either of the substances of the three steps of the gate, 
or of the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold, 
the key of heaven ; the other, of iron, the key of the 
prison in which the wicked teachers are to be bound 
who " have taken away the key of knowledge, yet 
entered not in themselves." 

We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor 
are to see, and feed ; and of all who do so it is said, 
" He that watereth, shall be watered also himself." 
But the reverse is truth also. He that watereth not, 
shall be withered himself ; and he that seeth not, shall 
himself be shut out of sight — shut into the perpetual 
prison-house. And that prison opens here, as well 
as hereafter ; he who is to be bound in heaven must 
first be bound on earth. That command to the strong 
angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, " Take 
him, and bind him hand and foot, and cast him out," 
issues, in its measure, against the teacher, for every 
help withheld, and for every truth refused, and for 
every falsehood enforced ; so that he is more strictly 
fettered the more he fetters, and farther outcast, as 
he more and more misleads, till at last the bars of the 
iron cage close upon him, and as " the golden opes, 
the iron shuts amain." 

25. We have got something out of the lines, I 
think, and much more is yet to be found in them ; but 
we have done enough by way of example of the kind 
of word-by-word examination of your author which 
is rightly called "reading;" watching every accent 



26 SESAME AND LILIES. 

and expression, and putting ourselves always in the 
author's place, annihilating our own personality, and 
seeking to enter into his, so as to be able assuredly to 
say, " Thus Milton thought," not " Thus /thought, in 
mis-reading Milton." And by this process you will 
gradually come to attach less weight to your own 
" Thus I thought " at other times. You will begin to 
perceive that what you thought was a matter of no 
serious importance ; that your thoughts on any sub- 
ject are not perhaps the clearest and wisest that could 
be arrived at thereupon : in fact, that unless you are 
a very singular person, you cannot be said to have any 
" thoughts " at all ; that you have no materials for 
them, in any serious matters ; 1 — no right to " think," 
but only to try to learn more of the facts. Nay, most 
probably all your life (unless, as I said, you are a 
singular person) you will have no legitimate right to 
an " opinion " on any business, except that instantly 
under your hand. What must of necessity be done, 
you can always find out, beyond question, how to do. 
Have you a house to keep in order, a commodity to 
sell, a field to plough, a ditch to cleanse ? There need 
be no two opinions about these proceedings ; it is at 
your peril if you have not much more than an " opin- 
ion " on the way to manage such matters. And also, 
outside of your own business, there are one or two 
subjects on which you are bound to have but one 
opinion. That roguery and lying are objectionable, 
and are instantly to be flogged out of the way when- 
ever discovered ; that covetousness and love of 
quarrelling are dangerous dispositions even in chil- 

1 Modern " education " for the most part signifies giving peo- 
ple the faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable subject 
of importance to them. 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 27 

dren, and deadly dispositions in men and nations; 
that in the end, the God of heaven and earth loves 
active, modest, and kind people, and hates idle, proud, 
greedy, and cruel ones ; — on these general facts you 
are bound to have but one, and that a very strong 
opinion. For the rest, respecting religions, govern- 
ments, sciences, arts, you will find that, on the whole, 
you can know NOTHING, — judge nothing ; that the 
best you can do, even though you may be a well- 
educated person, is to be silent, and strive to be 
wiser every day, and to understand a little more of 
the thoughts of others, which so soon as you try to do 
honestly, you will discover that the thoughts even of 
the wisest are very little more than pertinent questions. 
To put the difficulty into a clear shape, and exhibit to 
you the grounds for ^decision, that is all they can 
generally do for you ! — and well for them and for 
us, if indeed they are able " to mix the music with 
our thoughts, and sadden us with heavenly doubts." 
This writer, from whom I have been reading to you, 
is not among the first or wisest : he sees shrewdly as 
far as he sees, and therefore it is easy to find out his 
full meaning ; but with the greater men, you cannot 
fathom their meaning ; they do not even wholly mea- 
sure it themselves, — it is so wide. Suppose I had 
asked you, for instance, to seek for Shakespeare's 
opinion, instead of Milton's, on this matter of Church 
authority? — or for Dante's? Have any of you, 
at this instant, the least idea what either thought 
about it? Have you ever balanced the scene with 
the bishops in Richard III. against the character 
of Cranmer ? the description of St. Francis and St. 
Dominic against that of him who made Virgil wonder 
to gaze upon him, — " disteso, tanto vilmente, nell' 



28 SESAME AND LILIES. 

eterno esilio ; " 1 or of him whom Dante stood beside, 
" come '1 f rate che conf essa lo perfido assassin " ? 2 
Shakespeare and Alighieri knew men better than 
most of us, I presume ! They were both in the midst 
of the main struggle between the temporal and spirit- 
ual powers. They had an opinion, we may guess. 
But where is it ? Bring it into court ! Put Shake- 
speare's or Dante's creed into articles, and send it up 
for trial by the Ecclesiastical Courts ! 

26. You will not be able, I tell you again, for many 
and many a day, to come at the real purposes and teach- 
ing of these great men ; but a very little honest study 
of them will enable you to perceive that what you took 
for your own "judgment " was mere chance prejudice, 
and drifted, helpless, entangled weed of castaway 
thought ; nay, you will see that most men's minds 
are indeed little better than rough heath wilderness, 
neglected and stubborn, partly barren, partly over- 
grown with pestilent brakes, and venomous, wind-sown 
herbage of evil surmise ; that the first thing you have 
to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and scorn- 
fully to set fire to this; burn all the jungle into 
wholesome ash-heaps, and then plough and sow. All 
the true literary work before you, for life, must begin 
with obedience to that order, " Break up your fallow 
ground, and sow not among thorns." 

27. II. 3 Having then faithfully listened to the great 

[} Dante's Inferno, Canto xxiii. 125, 126. 

" O'er him who was extended on the cross 
So vilely in eternal banishment."] 

[ 2 The same, Canto xix. 49, 50. 

" I stood even as the friar who is confessing 
The false assassin." 

Longfellow's translation.] 

3 Compare § 13 above. 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 29 

teachers, that you may enter into their Thoughts, you 
have yet this higher advance to make ; — you have to 
enter into their Hearts. As you go to them first for 
clear sight, so you must stay with them, that you may 
share at last their just and mighty Passion. Passion, 
or " sensation." I am not afraid of the word ; still 
less of the thing. You have heard many outcries 
against sensation lately ; but, I can tell you, it is not 
less sensation we want, but more. The ennobling dif- 
ference between one man and another — between one 
animal and another — i>s precisely in this, that one 
feels more than another. If we were sponges, perhaps 
sensation might not be easily got for us ; if we were 
earth-worms, liable at every instant to be cut in two 
by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not 
be good for us. But being human creatures, it is 
good for us ; nay, we are only human in so far as we 
are sensitive, and our honor is precisely in proportion 
to our passion. 

28. You know I said of that great and pure society 
of the Dead, that it would allow " no vain or vulgar per- 
son to enter there." What do you think I meant by 
a "vulgar " person? What do you yourselves mean 
by " vulgarity " ? You will find it a fruitful subject 
of thought; but, briefly, the essence of all vulgarity 
lies in want of sensation. Simple and innocent vul- 
garity is merely an untrained and undeveloped blunt- 
ness of body and mind ; but in true inbred vulgarity, 
there is a deathful callousness, which, in extremity, 
becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and 
crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, 
and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the 
dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened 
conscience, that men become vulgar ; they are forever 



30 SESAME AND LILIES. 

vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable 
of sympathy — of quick understanding, — of all that, 
in deep insistence on the common but most accurate 
term, may be called the " tact," or " touch-faculty," of 
body and soul : that tact which the Mimosa has in 
trees, which the pure woman has above all - creatures : 
fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond reason ; the 
guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can 
but determine what is true : — it is the God-given 
passion of humanity which alone can recognize what 
God has made good. 

29. We come then to that great concourse of the 
Dead, not merely to know from them what is true, but 
chiefly to feel with them what is just. Now, to feel 
with them, we must be like them : and none of us can 
become that without pains. As the true knowledge 
is disciplined and tested knowledge, — not the first 
thought that comes, — so the true passion is disci- 
plined and tested passion, — not the first passion that 
comes. The first that come are the vain,' the false, the 
treacherous ; if you yield to them, they will lead you 
wildly and far, in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, 
till you have no true purpose and no true passion 
left. Not that any feeling possible to humanity is in 
itself wrong, but only wrong when undisciplined. Its 
nobility is in its force and justice ; it is wrong when 
it is weak, and felt for paltry cause. There is a mean 
wonder, as of a child who sees a juggler tossing golden 
balls, and this is base, if you will. But do you think 
that the wonder is ignoble, or the sensation less, with 
which every human soul is called to watch the golden 
balls of heaven tossed through the night by the Hand 
that made them? There is a mean curiosity, as of a 
child opening a forbidden door, or a servant prying 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 31 

into her master's business ; — and a noble curiosity, 
questioning, in the front of danger, the source of the 
great river beyond the sand, — the place of the great 
continent beyond the sea ; — a nobler curiosity still, 
which questions of the source of the River of Life, 
and of the space of the Continent of Heaven — things 
which " the angels desire to look into." So the anxiety 
is ignoble, with which you linger over the course and 
catastrophe of an idle tale ; but do you think the 
anxiety is less, or greater, with which you watch, or 
ought to watch, the dealings of fate and destiny with 
the life of an agonized nation? Alas! it is the nar- 
rowness, selfishness, minuteness, of your sensation that 
you have to deplore in England at this day ; — sensa- 
tion which spends itself in bouquets and speeches; 
in re veilings and junketings ; in sham fights and gay 
puppet shows, while you can look on and see noble 
nations murdered, man by man, without an effort or 
a tear. 

30. I said " minuteness " and " selfishness " of sen- 
sation, but it would have been enough to have said 
" injustice " or " unrighteousness " of sensation. For 
as in nothing is a gentleman better to be discerned 
from a vulgar person, so in nothing is a gentle nation 
(such nations have been) better to be discerned from 
a mob, than in this, — that their feelings are constant 
and just, results of due contemplation, and of equal 
thought. You can talk a mob into anything ; its feel- 
ings may be — usually are — on the whole, generous 
and right ; but it has no foundation for them, no hold 
of them ; you may tease or tickle it into any, at your 
pleasure ; it thinks by infection, for the most part, 
catching an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing 
so little that it will not roar itself wild about, when 



32 SESAME AND LILIES. 

the fit is on ; — nothing so great but it will forget in 
an hour, when the fit is past. But a gentleman's, or 
a gentle nation's, passions are just, measured, and 
continuous. A great nation, for instance, does not 
spend its entire national wits for a couple of months 
in weighing evidence of a single ruffian's having done 
a single murder ; and for a couple of years see its 
own children murder each other by their thousands 
or tens of thousands "a day, considering only what 
the effect is likely to be on the price of cotton, and 
caring nowise to determine which side of battle is in 
the wrong. Neither does a great nation send its poor 
little boys to jail for stealing six walnuts ; and allow 
its bankrupts to steal their hundreds of thousands 
with a bow, and its bankers rich with poor men's 
savings, to close their doors "under circumstances 
over which they have no control," with a " by your 
leave ; " and large landed estates to be bought by 
men who have made their money by going with armed 
steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium 
at the cannon's mouth, and altering, for the benefit 
of the foreign nation, the common highwayman's 
demand of " your money or your life," into that of 
" your money and your life." Neither does a great 
nation allow the lives of its innocent poor to be 
parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted out of 
them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a 
life extra per week to its landlords; 1 and then de- 
bate, with drivelling tears, and diabolical sympathies, 
whether it ought not piously to save, and nursingly 
cherish, the lives of its murderers. Also, a great 

1 See note at end of lecture. I have put it in large type, 
because the course of matters since it was written has made 
it perhaps better worth attention. 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 33 

nation, having made up its mind that hanging is quite 
the wholesomest process for its homicides in general, 
can yet with mercy distinguish between the degrees 
of guilt in homicides ; and does not yelp like a pack 
of frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the blood-track of an 
unhappy crazed boy, or gray-haired clodpate Othello, 
" perplexed i' the extreme," at the very moment that 
it is sending a Minister of the Crown to make polite 
speeches to a man who is bayoneting young girls in 
their fathers' sight, and killing noble youths in cool 
blood, faster than a country butcher kills lambs in 
spring. And, lastly, a great nation does not mock 
Heaven and its Powers, by pretending belief in a 
revelation which asserts the love of money to be the 
root of all evil, and declaring, at the same time, that 
it is actuated, and intends to be actuated, in all chief 
national deeds and measures, by no other love. 

31. My friends, I do not know why any of us 
should talk about reading. We want some sharper 
discipline than that of reading ; but, at all events, be 
assured, we cannot read. No reading is possible for 
a people with its mind in this state. No sentence 
of any great writer is intelligible to them. It t is 
simply and sternly impossible for the English public, 
at this moment, to understand any thoughtful writ- 
ing, — so incapable of thought has it become in its 
insanity of avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, 
little worse than this incapacity of thought ; it is not 
corruption of the inner nature ; we ring true still, 
when anything strikes home to us ; and though the 
idea that everything should " pay " has infected our 
every purpose so deeply, that even when we would 
play the good Samaritan, we never take out our two- 
pence and give them to the host without saying, 



34 SESAME AND LILIES. 

" When I come again, thou shalt give me fourpence," 
there is a capacity of noble passion left in our hearts' 
core. We show it in our work — in our war — even 
in those unjust domestic affections which make us 
furious at a small private wrong, while we are polite 
to a boundless public one : we are still industrious to 
the last hour of the day, though we add the gambler's 
fury to the laborer's patience ; we are still brave to 
the death, though incapable of discerning true cause 
for battle ; and are still true in affection to our own 
flesh, to the death, as the sea-monsters are, and the 
rock-eagles. And there is hope for a nation while 
this can be still said of it. As long as it holds its 
life in its hand, ready to give it for its honor (though 
a foolish honor), for its love (though a selfish love), 
and for its business (though a base business), there is 
hope for it. But hope only ; for this instinctive, reck- 
less virtue cannot last. No nation can last, which has 
made a mob of itself, however generous at heart. It 
must discipline its passions, and direct them, or they 
will discipline it, one day, with scorpion-whips. Above 
all, a nation cannot last as a money-making mob : it 
cannot with impunity — it cannot with existence — 
go on despising literature, despising science, despising 
art, despising nature, despising compassion, and con- 
centrating its soul on Pence. Do you think these are 
harsh or wild words ? Have patience -with me but a 
little longer. I will prove their truth to you, clause 
by clause. 

32. I. I say first we have despised literature. What 
do we, as a nation, care about books ? How much do 
you think we spend altogether on our libraries, pub- 
lic or private, as compared with what we spend on our 
horses ? If a man spends lavishly on his library, you 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 35 

call him mad — a bibliomaniac. But you never call 
any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves 
every day by their horses, and you do not hear of peo- 
ple ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lower 
still, how much do you think the contents of the book- 
shelves of the United Kingdom, public and private, 
would fetch, as compared with the contents of its 
wine-cellars? What position would its expenditure 
on literature take, as compared with its expenditure 
on luxurious eating ? We talk of food for the mind, 
as of food for the body : now a good book contains 
such food inexhaustibly ; it is a provision for life, and 
for the best part of us; yet how long most people 
would look at the best book before they would give the 
price of a large turbot for it! Though there have 
been men who have pinched their stomachs and bared 
their backs to buy a book, whose libraries were cheaper 
to them, I think, in the end, than most men's dinners 
are. We are few of us put to such trial, and more 
the pity ; for, indeed, a precious thing is all the more 
precious to us if it has been won by work or econ- 
omy; and if public libraries were half as costly as 
public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what 
bracelets do, even foolish men and women might some- 
times suspect there was good in reading, as well as in 
munching and sparkling ; whereas the very cheapness 
of literature is making even wise people forget that if 
a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book 
is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is 
it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-read, 
and loved, and loved again ; and marked, so that you 
can refer to the passages you want in it, as a soldier 
can seize the weapon he needs in an armory, or a 
housewife bring the spice she needs from her store. 



36 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Bread of flour is good ; but there is bread, sweet as 
honey, if we would eat it, in a good book ; and the 
family must be poor indeed which, once in their lives, 
cannot, for such multipliable barley -loaves, pay their 
baker's bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and 
we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each other's 
books out of circulating libraries ! 1 

33. II. I say we have despised science. " What ! " 
you exclaim, " are we not foremost in all discovery, 2 
and is not the whole world giddy by reason, or un- 
reason, of our inventions ? " Yes, but do you suppose 
that is national work ? That work is all done in spite 
of the nation ; by private people's zeal and money. 
We are glad enough, indeed, to make our profit of 
science ; we snap up anything in the way of a scientific 
bone that has meat on it, eagerly enough ; but if the 
scientific man comes for a bone or a crust to us, that 
is another story. What have we publicly done for 
science ? We are obliged to know what o'clock it is, 
for the safety of our ships, and therefore we pay for 
an Observatory ; and we allow ourselves, in the person 

[ l In the preface to the 1871 edition of Sesame and Lilies, 
Ruskin wrote : " I would urge upon every young man, as the 
beginning of his due and wise provision for his household, to 
obtain as soon as he can, by the severest economy, a restricted, 
serviceable, and steadily — however slowly — increasing, series 
of books for use through life ; making his little library, of all 
the furniture in his room, the most studied and decorative 
piece ; every volume having its assigned place, like a little 
statue in its niche, and one of the earliest and strictest lessons 
to the children of the house being how to turn the pages of their 
own literary possessions lightly and deliberately, with no chance 
of tearing or dogs'-ears."] 

2 Since this was written, the answer has become definitely — 
No ; we having surrendered the field of Arctic discovery to the 
Continental nations, as being ourselves too poor to pay for ships. 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES, 37 

of our Parliament, to be annually tormented into doing 
something, in a slovenly way, for the British Museum ; 
sullenly apprehending that to be a place for keeping 
stuffed birds in, to amuse our children. If anybody 
will pay for their own telescope, and resolve another 
nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it were 
our own ; if one in ten thousand of our hunting squires 
suddenly perceives that the earth was indeed made to 
be something else than a portion for foxes, and bur- 
rows in it himself, and tells us where the gold is, and 
where the coals, we understand that there is some use 
in that ; and very properly knight him : but is the 
accident of his having found out how to employ him- 
self usefully any credit to us ? (The negation of such 
discovery among his brother squires may perhaps be 
some discredit to us, if we would consider of it.) But 
if you doubt these generalities, here is one fact for us 
all to meditate upon, illustrative of our love of science. 
Two years ago there was a collection of the fossils of 
Solenhof en to be sold in Bavaria : the best in existence, 
containing many specimens unique for perfectness, and 
one, unique as an example of a species (a whole king- 
dom of unknown living creatures being announced 
by that fossil). This collection, of which the mere 
market worth, among private buyers, would probably 
have been some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, 
was offered to the English nation for seven hundred : 
but we would not give seven hundred, and the whole 
series would have been in the Munich museum at this 
moment, if Professor Owen 1 had not, with loss of his 

1 I state this fact without Professor Owen's permission, which 
of course he could not with propriety have granted, had I asked 
it; but I consider it so important that the public should be aware 
of the fact, that I do what seems to me right, though rude. 



38 SESAME AND LILIES. 

own time, and patient tormenting of the British public 
in person of its representatives, got leave to give four 
hundred pounds at once, and himself become answer- 
able for the other three ! which the said public will 
doubtless pay him eventually, but sulkily, and caring 
nothing about the matter all the while ; only always 
ready to cackle if any credit comes of it. Consider, 
I beg of you, arithmetically, what this fact means. 
Your annual expenditure for public purposes (a third 
of it for military apparatus) is at least fifty millions. 
Now £700 is to £50,000,000, roughly, as seven-pence 
to two thousand pounds. Suppose, then, a gentleman 
of unknown income, but whose wealth was to be con- 
jectured from the fact that he spent two thousand a 
year on his park walls and footmen only, professes 
himself fond of science ; and that one of his servants 
comes eagerly to tell him that an unique collection of 
fossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to be 
had for the sum of seven-pence sterling ; and that the 
gentleman, who is fond of science, and spends two 
thousand a year on his park, answers, after keeping 
his servant waiting several months, " Well ! I '11 give 
you four-pence for them, if you will be answerable for 
the extra three-pence yourself, till next year ! " 

34. III. I say you have despised Art ! " What ! " 
you again answer, " have we not Art exhibitions, miles 
long ? and do not we pay thousands of pounds for sin- 
gle pictures ? and have we not Art schools and insti- 
tutions, more than ever nation had before ? " Yes, 
truly, but all that is for the sake of the shop. You 
would fain sell canvas as well as coals, and crockery 
as well as iron ; you would take every other nation's 
bread out of its mouth if you could ; 1 not being able 

1 That was our real idea of " Free Trade " — " All the trade 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 39 

to do that, your ideal of life is to stand in the thor- 
oughfares of the world, like Ludgate apprentices, 
screaming to every passer-by, "What d'ye lack?" 1 
You know nothing of your own faculties or circum- 
stances ; you fancy that, among your damp, flat, fat 
fields of clay, you can have as quick art-fancy as the 
Frenchman among his bronzed vines, or the Italian 
under his volcanic cliffs ; — that Art may be learned 
as book-keeping is, and when learned, will give you 
more books to keep. You care for pictures, absolutely, 
no more than you do for the bills pasted on your dead 
walls. There is always room on the walls for the bills 
to be read, — never for the pictures to be seen. You 
do not know what pictures you have (by repute) in the 
country, nor whether they are false or true, nor whether 
they are taken care of or not ; in foreign countries, you 
calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the world 
rotting in abandoned wreck — (in Venice you saw the 
Austrian guns deliberately pointed at the palaces con- 
taining them), and if you heard that all the fine pic- 
tures in Europe were made into sand-bags to-morrow 
on the Austrian forts, it would not trouble you so 
much as the chance of a brace or two of game less in 
your own bags, in a day's shooting. That is your 
national love of Art. 

35. IV. You have despised nature ; that is to say, 
all the deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. 
The French revolutionists made stables of the cathe- 
drals of France ; you have made racecourses of the 
cathedrals of the earth. Your one conception of plea- 

to myself." You find now that by " competition " other people 
can manage to sell something as well as you — and now we call 
for Protection again. Wretches ! 

1 [An old practice of the Elizabethan age.] 



40 SESAME AND LILIES. 

sure is to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, 
and eat off their altars. 1 You have put a railroad- 
bridge over the falls of Schaffhausen. You have tun- 
nelled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's chapel ; you have 
destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva ; 
there is not a quiet valley in England that you have not 
filled with bellowing fire ; there is no particle left of 
English land which you have not trampled coal ashes 
into 2 — nor any foreign city in which the spread of 
your presence is not marked among its fair old streets 
and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of 
new hotels and perfumers' shops : the Alps themselves, 
which your own poets used to love so reverently, you 
look upon as soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you 
set yourselves to climb and slide down again, with 
" shrieks of delight." When you are past shrieking, 
having no human articulate voice to say you are glad 
with, you fill the quietude of their valleys with gun- 
powder blasts, and rush home, red with cutaneous 
eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hic- 
cough of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two 
sorrowfullest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, 
taking the deep inner significance of them, are the 
English mobs in the valley of Chamouni, amusing 
themselves with firing rusty howitzers ; and the Swiss 
vintagers of Zurich expressing their Christian thanks 
for the gift of the vine, by assembling in knots in the 

1 I meant that the beautiful places of the world — Switzer- 
land, Italy, South Germany, and so on — are, indeed, the truest 
cathedrals — places to be reverent in, and to worship in : and 
that we only care to drive through them ; and to eat and drink 
at their most sacred places. 

2 I was singularly struck, some years ago, by finding all the 
river shore at Richmond, in Yorkshire, black in its earth, from 
the mere drift of soot-laden air from places many miles away. 



7. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 41 

"towers of the vineyards," and slowly loading and fir- 
ing horse-pistols from morning till evening. It is 
pitiful, to have dim conceptions of duty ; more pitiful, 
it seems to me, to have conceptions like these, of mirth. 

36. Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no 
need of words of mine for proof of this. I will merely 
print one of the newspaper paragraphs which I am in 
the habit of cutting out and throwing into my store- 
drawer ; here is one from a " Daily Telegraph " of 
an early date this year (1865) ; (date which, though 
by me carelessly left unmarked, is easily discoverable ; 
for on the back of the slip, there is the announce- 
ment that " yesterday the seventh of the special ser- 
vices of this year was performed by the Bishop of 
Ripon in St. Paul's"); it relates only one of such 
facts as happen now daily; this by chance having 
taken a form in which it came before the coroner. 
I will print the paragraph in red. Be sure, the 
facts themselves are written in that color, in a book 
which we shall all of us, literate or illiterate, have to 
read our page of, some day. 1 

" An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. Richards, 
deputy coroner, at the White Horse Tavern, Christ 
Church, Spitalfields, respecting the death of Michael 
Collins, aged 58 years. Mary Collins, a miserable- 
looking woman, said that she lived with the deceased 
and his son in a room at 2, Cobb's Court, Christ 
Church. Deceased was a ' translator ' of boots. 
Witness went out and bought old boots; deceased 
and his son made them into good ones, and then wit- 
ness sold them for what she could get at the shops, 
which was very little indeed. Deceased and his son 

[ x In his own edition, Mr. Ruskin printed all the rest of § 36 
in red ink, except his footnotes.] 



42 SESAME AND LILIES. 

used to work night and day to try and get a little 
bread and tea, and pay for the room (2s. a. week), 
so as to keep the home together. On Friday night 
week deceased got up from his bench and began to 
shiver. He threw down his boots, saying, 'Some- 
body else must finish them when I am gone, for I can 
do no more.' There was no fire, and he said, ' I 
would be better if I was warm.' Witness therefore 
took two pairs of translated boots 1 to sell at the shop, 
but she could only get 14c?. for the two pairs, for the 
people at the shop said, ' We must have our profit.' 
Witness got 14 lb. of coal, and a little tea and bread. 
Her son sat up the whole night to make the ' trans- 
lations,' to get money, but deceased died on Saturday 
morning. The family never had enough to eat. — 
Coroner : ' It seems to me deplorable that you did 
not go into the workhouse.' Witness : 4 We wanted 
the comforts of our little home.' A juror asked what 
the comforts were, for he only saw a little straw in the 
corner of the room, the windows of which were broken. 
The witness began to cry, and said that they had a 
quilt and other little things. The deceased said he 
never would go into the workhouse. In summer, when 
the season was good, they sometimes made as much 
as 10s. profit in the week. They then always saved 
towards the next week, which was generally a bad 
one. In winter they made not half so much. For 
three years they had been getting from bad to worse. 
— Cornelius Collins said that he had assisted his 
father since 1847. They used to work so far into the 
night that both nearly lost their eyesight. Witness 

1 One of the things which we must very resolutely enforce, 
for the good of all classes, in our future arrangements, must be 
that they wear no " translated " article of dress. 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 43 

now had a film over his eyes. Five years ago de- 
ceased applied to the parish for aid. The reliev- 
ing officer gave him a 4 lb. loaf, and told him if he 
came again he should get the ; stones.' * That dis- 
gusted deceased, and he would have nothing to do 
with them since. They got worse and worse until 
last Friday week, when they had not even a half- 

1 [/. e., working at breaking stones in the road.] This abbre- 
viation of the penalty of useless labor is curiously coincident 
in verbal form with a certain passage which some of us may 
remember. [See Matthew vii. 9.] It may perhaps be well to 
preserve beside this paragraph another cutting out of my store- 
drawer, from the Morning Post, of about a parallel date, Friday, 

March 10th, 1865 : — " The salons of Mme. C , who did the 

honors with clever imitative grace and elegance, were crowded 
with princes, dukes, marquises, and counts — in fact, with the 
same male company as one meets at the parties of the Princess 
Metternich and Madame Drouyn de Lhuys. Some English 
peers and members of Parliament were present, and appeared 
to enjoy the animated and dazzling improper scene. On the 
second floor the supper tables were loaded with every delicacy 
of the season. That your readers may form some idea of the 
dainty fare of the Parisian demi-monde, I copy the menu of the 
supper, which was served to all the guests (about 200) seated 
at four o'clock. Choice Yquem, Johannisberg, Laffitte, Tokay, 
and champagne of the finest vintages were served most lav- 
ishly throughout the morning. After supper, dancing was 
resumed with increased animation, and the ball terminated with 
a chaine diabolique and a cancan d'enfer at seven in the morning. 
(Morning service — ' Ere the fresh lawns appeared, under the 
opening eyelids of the Morn.') Here is the menu : — ' Con- 
somme' de volaille a la Bagration : 16 hors-d'oeuvres varies. Bou- 
che'es a la Talleyrand. Saumons froids, sauce Ravigote. Filets 
de bceuf en Bellevue, timbales milanaises, chaudf roid de gibier. 
Dindes truffe'es. Pate's de foies gras, buissons d'dcrevisses, 
salades vendtiennes, gele'es blanches aux fruits, gateaux man- 
cini, parisiens et parisiennes. Fromages glaces. Ananas. 
Dessert.' " 



44 SESAME AND LILIES. 

penny to buy a candle. Deceased then lay down on 
the straw, and said he could not live till morning. — 
A juror : ' You are dying of starvation yourself, and 
you ought to go into the house until the summer.' — 
Witness : ' If we went in, we should die. When we 
come out in the summer, we should be like people 
dropped from the sky. No one would know us, and 
we would not have even a room. I could work now 
if I had food, for my sight would get better.' Dr. 
G. P. Walker said deceased died from syncope, from 
exhaustion from want of food. The deceased had had 
no bedclothes. For four months he had had nothing 
but bread to eat. There was not a particle of fat in 
the body. There was no disease, but if there had 
been medical attendance, he might have survived the 
syncope or fainting. The coroner having remarked 
upon the painful nature of the case, the jury returned 
the following verdict, 'That deceased died from ex- 
haustion from want of food and the common necessa- 
ries of life ; also through want of medical aid.' ' 

37. "Why would witness not go into the work- 
house?" you ask. Well, the poor seem to have a 
prejudice against the workhouse which the rich have 
not ; for of course every one who takes a pension 
from Government goes into the workhouse on a grand 
scale : a only the workhouses for the rich do not in- 
volve the idea of work, and should be called play- 
houses. But the poor like to die independently, it 
appears ; perhaps if we made the play-houses for 
them pretty and pleasant enough, or gave them their 

1 Please observe this statement, and think of it, and consider 
how it happens that a poor old woman will be ashamed to take 
a shilling a week from the country — but no one is ashamed to 
take a pension of a thousand a year. 



I. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 45 

pensions at home, and allowed them a little introduc- 
tory peculation with the public money, their minds 
might be reconciled to the conditions. Meantime, 
here are the facts : we make our relief either so in- 
sulting to them, or so painful, that they rather die 
than take it at our hands ; or, for third alternative, 
we leave them so untaught and foolish that they 
starve like brute creatures, wild and dumb, not know- 
ing what to do, or what to ask. I say, you despise 
compassion ; if you did not, such a newspaper para- 
graph would be as impossible in a Christian country 
as a deliberate assassination permitted in its public 
streets. 1 "Christian" did I say? Alas, if we were 

1 I am heartily glad to see such a paper as the Pall Mall 
Gazette established ; for the power of the press in the hands 
of highly educated men, in independent position, and of honest 
purpose, may indeed become all that it has been hitherto vainly 
vaunted to be. Its editor will therefore, I doubt not, pardon 
me, in that, by very reason of my respect for the journal, I do 
not let pass unnoticed an article in its third number, page 5, 
which was wrong in every word of it, with the intense wrong- 
ness which only an honest man can achieve who has taken a 
false turn of thought in the outset, and is following it, regard- 
less of consequences. It contained at the end this notable pas- 
sage : — 

" The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction — aye, 
and the bedstead and blankets of affliction, are the very utmost 
that the law ought to give to outcasts merely as outcasts." I 
merely put beside this expression of the gentlemanly mind of 
England in 1865, a part of the message which Isaiah was ordered 
to " lift up his voice like a trumpet " in declaring to the gentle- 
men of his day : " Ye fast for strife, and to smite with the fist 
of wickedness. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to deal 
thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are 
cast out (margin, ' afflicted ') to thy house ? " The falsehood on 
which the writer had mentally founded himself, as previously 
stated by him, was this : " To confound the functions of the dis- 
pensers of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers of a char- 



46 SESAME AND LILIES. 

but wholesomely im-Christian, it would be impossi- 
ble : it is our imaginary Christianity that helps us to 
commit these crimes, for we revel and luxuriate in our 
faith, for the lewd sensation of it ; dressing it up, like 
everything else, in fiction. The dramatic Christianity 
of the organ and aisle, of dawn-service and twilight- 
revival — the Christianity which we do not fear to 
mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our play about 
the devil, in our Satanellas, — Roberts, — Fausts ; 
chanting hymns through traceried windows for back- 
ground effect, and artistically modulating the " Dio " 
through variation on variation of mimicked prayer 
(while we distribute tracts, next day, for the benefit 
of uncultivated swearers, upon what we suppose to 
be the signification of the Third Commandment) ; — 
this gas-lighted, and gas-inspired, Christianity, we are 
triumphant in, and draw back the hem of our robes 
from the touch of the heretics who dispute it. But to 
do a piece of common Christian righteousness in a 
plain English word or deed ; to make Christian law 
any rule of life, and found one National act or hope 
thereon, — we know too well what our faith comes to 

itable institution is a great and pernicious error." This sentence 
is so accurately and exquisitely wrong, that its substance must 
be thus reversed in our minds before we can deal with any exist- 
ing problem of national distress. " To understand that the dis- 
pensers of the poor-rates are the almoners of the nation, and 
should distribute its alms with a gentleness and freedom of 
hand as much greater and franker than that possible to individ- 
ual charity, as the collective national wisdom and power may be 
supposed greater than those of any single person, is the founda- 
tion of all law respecting pauperism. ,, (Since this was written 
the Pall Mall Gazette has become a mere party paper — like the 
rest ; but it writes well, and does more good than mischief on 
the whole.) 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 47 

for that ! You might sooner get lightning out of 
incense smoke than true action or passion out of your 
modern English religion. You had better get rid of 
the smoke, and the organ pipes, both : leave them, 
and the Gothic windows, and the painted glass, to the 
property man ; give up your carburetted hydrogen 
ghost in one healthy expiration, and look after Laz- 
arus at the doorstep. For there is a true Church 
wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and that 
is the only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or 
ever shall be. 

38. All these pleasures then, and all these virtues, 
I repeat, you nationally despise. You have, indeed, 
men among you who do not ; by whose work, by 
whose strength, by whose life, by whose death, you 
live, and never thank them. Your wealth, your 
amusement, your pride, would all be alike impossible, 
but for those whom you scorn or forget. The police- 
man, who is walking up and down the black lane all 
night to watch the guilt you have created there ; and 
may have his brains beaten out, and be maimed for 
life, at any moment, and never be thanked ; the sailor 
wrestling with the sea's rage ; the quiet student por- 
ing over his book or his vial ; the common worker, 
without praise, and nearly without bread, fulfilling his 
task as your horses drag your carts, hopeless, and 
spurned of all : these are the men by whom England 
lives ; but they are not the nation ; they are only the 
body and nervous force of it, acting still from old 
habit in a convulsive perseverance, while the mind is 
gone. Our National wish and purpose are only to be 
amused ; our National religion is the performance of 
church ceremonies, and preaching of soporific truths 
(or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at work, while 



48 SESAME AND LILIES. 

we amuse ourselves ; and the necessity for this amuse- 
ment is fastening on us, as a feverous disease of 
parched throat and wandering eyes — senseless, dis- 
solute, merciless. How literally that word Z)is-Ease, 
the Negation and possibility of Ease, expresses the 
entire moral state of our English Industry and its 
Amusements ! 

39. When men are rightly occupied, their amuse- 
ment grows out of their work, as the color-petals out 
of a fruitful flower ; — when they are faithfully help- 
ful and compassionate, all their emotions become 
steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as 
the natural pulse to the body. But now, having no 
true business, we pour our whole masculine energy 
into the false business of money-making ; and having 
no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed 
up for us to play with, not innocently, as children 
with dolls, but guiltily and darkly, as the idolatrous 
Jews with their pictures on cavern walls, which men 
had to dig to detect. The justice we do not execute, 
we mimic in the novel and on the stage ; for the beauty 
we destroy in nature, we substitute the metamorphosis 
of the pantomime, and (the human nature of us im- 
peratively requiring awe and sorrow of some kind) 
for the noble grief we should have borne with our 
fellows, and the pure tears we should have wept with 
them, we gloat over the pathos of the police court, 
and gather the night-dew of the grave. 

40. It is difficult to estimate the true significance 
of these things ; the facts are frightful enough ; — the 
measure of national fault involved in them is perhaps 
not as great as it would at first seem. We permit, or 
cause, thousands of deaths daily, but we mean no 
harm ; we set fire to houses, and ravage peasants' 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 49 

fields, yet we should be sorry to find we had injured 
anybody. We are still kind at heart; still capable 
of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers, 1 at the 
end of his long life, having had much power with the 
public, being plagued in some serious matter by a 
reference to " public opinion," uttered the impatient 
exclamation, " The public is just a great baby ! " 
And the reason that I have allowed all these graver 
subjects of thought to mix themselves up with an 
inquiry into methods of reading, is that, the more I 
see of our national faults or miseries, the more they 
resolve themselves into conditions of childish illiter- 
ateness and want of education in the most ordinary 
habits of thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfish- 
ness, not dulness of brain, which we have to lament ; 
but an unreachable schoolboy's recklessness, only dif- 
fering from the true schoolboy's in its incapacity of 
being helped, because it acknowledges no master. 

41. There is a curious type of us given in one of 
the lovely, neglected works of the last of our great 
painters. 2 It is a drawing of Kirkby Lonsdale church- 
yard, and of its brook, and valley, and hills, and 
folded morning sky beyond. And unmindful alike 
of these, and of the dead who have left these for 
other valleys and for other skies, a group of school- 
boys have piled their little books upon a grave, to 
strike them off with stones. So, also, we play with 
the words of the dead that would teach us, and strike 

\} Thomas Chalmers [1780-1847] was a Scottish divine who 
was one of the earliest in the present age to make a large appli- 
cation of the principles of Christianity to the great problems of 
poverty and industrial society.] 

[ 2 J. M. W. Turner, of whose art Ruskin was a conspicuous 
interpreter.] 



50 SESAME AND LILIES. 

them far from us with our bitter, reckless will ; little 
thinking that those leaves which the wind scatters had 
been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon the 
seal of an enchanted vault — nay, the gate of a great 
city of sleeping kings, who would awake for us, and 
walk with us, if we knew but how to call them by 
therr names. How often, even if we lift the marble 
entrance gate, do we but wander among those old 
kings in their repose, and finger the robes they lie in, 
and stir the crowns on their foreheads, and still they 
are silent to us, and seem but a dusty imagery ; be- 
cause we know not the incantation of the heart that 
would wake them ; — which, if they once heard, they 
would start up to meet us in their power of long ago, 
narrowly to look upon us, and consider us ; and, as 
the fallen kings of Hades meet the newly fallen, say- 
ing, " Art thou also become weak as we — art thou 
also become one of us ? " so would these kings, with 
their undimmed, unshaken diadems, meet us, saying, 
" Art thou also become pure and mighty of heart as 
we ? art thou also become one of us ? " 

42. Mighty of heart, mighty of mind — " magnani- 
mous " — to be this, is indeed to be great in life; to 
become this increasingly, is, indeed, to " advance in 
life," — in life itself — not in the trappings of it. My 
friends, do you remember that old Scythian custom, 
when the head of a house died ? How he was dressed 
in his finest dress, and set in his chariot, and carried 
about to his friends' houses ; and each of them placed 
at his table's head, and all feasted in his presence? 
Suppose it were offered to you in plain words, as it 
is offered to you in dire facts, that you should gain 
this Scythian honor, gradually, while you yet thought 
yourself alive. Suppose the offer were this: You 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 51 

shall die slowly; your blood shall daily grow cold, 
your flesh petrify, your heart beat at last only as a 
rusted group of iron valves. Your life shall fade 
from you, and sink through the earth into the ice of 
Caina ; but, day by day, your body shall be dressed 
more gaily, and set in higher chariots, and have more 
orders on its breast — crowns on its head, if you wilL 
Men shall bow before it, stare and shout round it, 
crowd after it up and down the streets ; build pal- 
aces for it, feast with it at their tables' heads all the 
night long ; your soul shall stay enough within it to 
know what they do, and feel the weight of the golden 
dress on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge 
on the skull ; — no more. Would you take the offer, 
verbally made by the death-angel ? Would the mean- 
est among us take it, think you ? Yet practically and 
verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure ; 
many of us grasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every 
man accepts it, who desires to advance in life without 
knowing what life is ; who means only that he is to 
get more horses, and more footmen, and more fortune, 
and more public honor, and — not more personal soul. 
He only is advancing in life, whose heart is getting 
softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, 
whose spirit is entering into Living 1 peace. And the 
men who have this life in them are the true lords or 
kings of the earth — they, and they only. All other 
kingships, so far as they are true, are only the practi- 
cal issue and expression of theirs ; if less than this, 
they are either dramatic royalties, — costly shows, set 
off, indeed, with real jewels instead of tinsel — but 
still only the toys of nations ; or else, they are no roy- 

1 " to 5e (pp6vr)/j.a rod irvevfjLaTos (cor) teal elprivr)." [Epistle to Ro- 
mans viii. 6. " To be spiritually minded is life and peace."] 



52 SESAME AND LILIES. 

alties at all, but tyrannies, or the mere active and 
practical issue of national folly ; for which reason I 
have said of them elsewhere, " Visible governments 
are the toys of some nations, the diseases of others, 
the harness of some, the burdens of more." 

43. But I have no words for the wonder with which 
I hear Kinghood still spoken of, even among thought- 
ful men, as if governed nations were a personal pro- 
perty, and might be bought and sold, or otherwise 
acquired, as sheep, of whose flesh their king was to 
feed, and whose fleece he was to gather ; as if Achilles' 
indignant epithet of base kings, " people-eating," were 
the constant and proper title of all monarchs; and en- 
largement of a king's dominion meant the same thing 
as the increase of a private man's estate ! Kings who 
think so, however powerful, can no more be the true 
kings of the nation than gadflies are the kings of a 
horse ; they suck it, and may drive it wild, but do not 
guide it. They, and their courts, and their armies 
are, if one could see clearly, only a large species of 
marsh mosquito, with bayonet proboscis and melodi- 
ous, band-mastered trumpeting, in the summer air; 
the twilight being, perhaps, sometimes fairer, but 
hardly more wholesome, for its glittering mists of 
midge companies. The true kings, meanwhile, rule 
quietly, if at all, and hate ruling ; too many of them 
make " il gran rifiuto ; " * and if they do not, the mob, 
as soon as they are likely to become useful to it, is 
pretty sure to make its " gran rifiuto " of them. 

[ a The Great Refusal. See Longfellow's translation of Dante, 
Inferno, iii. 59, 60. 

" I looked and I beheld the shade of him 
Who made through cowardice the great refusal." 

The person thus characterized by Dante is held to be Pope 
Celestine, who abdicated the papal office.] 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 53 

44. Yet the visible king may also be a true one, 
some day, if ever day comes when he will estimate his 
dominion by the force of it, — not the geographical 
boundaries. It matters very little whether Trent cuts 
you a cantel out here, or Rhine rounds you a castle 
less there. But it does matter to you, king of men, 
whether you can verily say to this man "Go," and 
he goeth ; and to another, " Come," and he cometh. 
Whether you can turn your people, as you can Trent 
— and where it is that you bid them come, and where 
go. It matters to you, king of men, whether your 
people hate you, and die by you, or love you, and live 
by you. You may measure your dominion by multi- 
tudes, better than by miles; and count degrees of 
love-latitude, not from, but to, a wonderfully warm and 
infinite equator. 

45. Measure ! — nay, you cannot measure. Who 
shall measure the difference between the power of 
those who "do and teach," and who are greatest in 
the kingdoms of earth, as of heaven — and the power 
of those who undo, and consume — whose power, at 
the fullest, is only the power of the moth and the 
rust ? Strange ! to think how the Moth-kings lay up 
treasures for the moth ; and the Rust-kings, who are 
to their people's strength as rust to armor, lay up 
treasures for the rust ; and the Robber-kings, treasures 
for the robber ; but how few kings have ever laid up 
treasures that needed no guarding — treasures of which, 
the more thieves there were, the better ! Broidered 
robe, only to be rent ; helm and sword, only to be 
dimmed; jewel and gold, only to be scattered; — there 
have been three kinds of kings who have gathered 
jthese. Suppose there ever should arise a Fourth order 
of kings, who had read, in some obscure writing of 



54 SESAME AND LILIES. 

long ago, that there was a Fourth kind of treasure, 
which the jewel and gold could not equal, neither 
should it be valued with pure gold. A web made fair 
in the weaving, by Athena's shuttle ; an armor, forged 
in divine fire by Vulcanian force ; a gold to be mined 
in the very sun's red heart, where he sets over the 
Delphian cliffs ; — deep-pictured tissue ; — impenetra- 
ble armor ; — potable gold ! — the three great Angels 
of Conduct, Toil, and Thought, still calling to us, and 
waiting at the posts of our doors, to lead us, with their 
winged power, and guide us, with their unerring eyes, 
by the path which no fowl knoweth, and which the 
vulture's eye has not seen ! Suppose kings should 
ever arise, who heard and believed this word, and at 
last gathered and brought forth treasures of — Wis- 
dom — for their people ? 

46. Think what an amazing business that would 
be ! How inconceivable, in the state of our present 
national wisdom ! That we should bring up our 
peasants to a book exercise instead of a bayonet exer- 
cise ! — organize, drill, maintain with pay, and good 
generalship, armies of thinkers, instead of armies of 
stabbers ! — find national amusement in reading-rooms 
as rifle-grounds ; give prizes for a fair shot at a fact, 
as well as for a leaden splash on a target. What an 
absurd idea it seems, put fairly in words, that the 
wealth of the capitalists of civilized nations should 
ever come to support literature instead of war ! 

47. Have yet patience with me, while I read you a 
single sentence out of the only book, properly to be 
called a book, 1 that I have yet written myself, the one 
that will stand (if anything stand) surest and longest 
of all work of mine : — 

l l Unto this Last ; in the essay entitled " Ad Valorem."] 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 55 

" It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth in 
Europe that it is entirely capitalists' wealth which supports 
unjust wars. Just wars do not need so much money to 
support them ; for most of the men who wage such, wage 
them gratis ; hut for an unjust war, men's bodies and souls 
have both to be bought ; and the best tools of war for them 
besides, which makes such war costly to the maximum ; not 
to speak of the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, be- 
tween nations which have not grace nor honesty enough in 
all their multitudes to buy an hour's peace of mind with ; 
as, at present, France and England, purchasing of each 
other ten millions sterling worth of consternation, annually 
(a remarkably light crop, half thorns and half aspen leaves, 
sown, reaped, and granaried by the ' science ' of the modern 
political economist, teaching covetousness instead of truth). 
And, all unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage of the 
enemy, only by loans from capitalists, these loans are repaid 
by subsequent taxation of the people, who appear to have 
no will in the matter, the capitalists' will being the primary 
root of the war ; but its real root is the covetousness of the 
whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith, frankness, or 
justice, and bringing about, therefore, in due time, his own 
separate loss and punishment to each person." 

48. France and England literally, observe, buy 
panic of each other ; they pay, each of them, for ten 
thousand-thousand pounds' worth of terror, a year. 
Now suppose, instead of buying these ten millions' 
worth of panic annually, they made up their minds to 
be at peace with each other, and buy ten millions' 
worth of knowledge annually ; and that each nation 
spent its ten thousand-thousand pounds a year in 
founding royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal 
museums, royal gardens, and places of rest. Might 
it not be better somewhat for both French and Eng- 
lish? 



56 SESAME AND LILIES. 

49. It will be long, yet, before that comes to pass. 
Nevertheless, I hope it will not be long before royal 
or national libraries will be founded in every con- 
siderable city, with a royal series of books in them ; 
the same series in every one of them, chosen books, 
the best in every kind, prepared for that national 
series in the most perfect way possible; their text 
printed all on leaves of equal size, broad of margin, 
and divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand, 
beautiful, and strong, and thorough as examples of 
binders' work ; and that these great libraries will be 
accessible to all clean and orderly persons at all times 
of the day and evening ; strict law being enforced for 
this cleanliness and quietness. 

50. I could shape for you other plans, for art gal- 
leries, and for natural history galleries, and for many 
precious — many, it seems to me, needful — things ; 
but this book plan is the easiest and needfullest, and 
would prove a considerable tonic to what we call our 
British Constitution, which has fallen dropsical of late, 
and has an evil thirst, and evil hunger, and wants 
healthier feeding. You have got its corn laws repealed 
for it ; try if you cannot get corn laws established for 
it, dealing in a better bread;' — bread made of that 
old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens 
doors; — doors, not of robbers', but of Kings' Trea- 
suries. 

Note to 8 30. 



Respecting the increase of rent by the deaths of the 
poor, for evidence of which, see the preface to the 
Medical Officer's Report to the Privy Council, just 
published, there are suggestions in its preface which 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 57 

will make some stir among us, I fancy, respecting 
which let me note these points following : — 

There are two theories on the subject of land now 
abroad, and in contention ; both false. 

The first is that, by Heavenly law, there have 
always existed, and must continue to exist, a certain 
number of hereditarily sacred ^persons to whom the 
earth, air, and water of the world belong, as personal 
property ; of which earth, air, and water, these per- 
sons may, at their pleasure, permit, or forbid, the rest 
of the human race to eat, to breathe, or to drink. 
This theory is not for many years longer tenable. 
The adverse theory is that a division of the land of 
the world among the mob of the world would immedi- 
ately elevate the said mob into sacred personages ; 
that houses would then build themselves, and corn 
grow of itself ; and that everybody would be able to 
live, without doing any work for his living. This 
theory would also be found highly untenable in prac- 
tice. 

It will, however, require some rough experiments 
and rougher catastrophes, before the generality of 
persons will be convinced that no law concerning any- 
thing — least of all concerning land, for either hold- 
ing or dividing it, or renting it high, or renting it low 
— would be of the smallest ultimate use to the people, 
so long as the general contest for life, and for the 
means of life, remains one of mere brutal competition. 
That contest, in an unprincipled nation, will take one 
deadly form or another, whatever laws you make 
against it. For instance, it would be an entirely 
wholesome law for England, if it could be carried, 
that maximum limits should be assigned to incomes 
according to classes ; and that every nobleman's in- 



58 SESAME AND LILIES, 

come should be paid to him as a fixed salary or pen- 
sion by the nation ; and not squeezed by him in vari- 
able sums, at discretion, out of the tenants of his land. 
But if you could get such a law passed to-morrow, and 
if, which would be farther necessary, you could fix the 
value of the assigned incomes by making a given 
weight of pure bread for a given sum, a twelvemonth 
would not pass before another currency would have 
been tacitly established, and the power of accumu- 
lated wealth would have reasserted itself in some 
other article, or some other imaginary sign. There is 
only one cure for public distress — and that is public 
education, directed to make men thoughtful, merciful, 
and just. There are, indeed, many laws conceivable 
which would gradually better and strengthen the 
national temper; but, for the most part, they are 
such as the national temper must be much bettered 
before it would bear. A nation in its youth may be 
helped by laws, as a weak child by back-boards, but 
when it is old it cannot that way strengthen its 
crooked spine. 

And besides ; the problem of land, at its worst, is a 
bye one ; distribute the earth as you will, the princi- 
pal question remains inexorable, — who is to dig it ? 
Which of us, in brief word, is to do the hard and 
dirty work for the rest — and for what pay ? Who 
is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for what 
pay ? Who is to do no work, and for what pay ? 
And there are curious moral and religious questions 
connected with these. How far is it lawful to suck a 
portion of the soul out of a great many persons, in 
order to put the abstracted psychical quantities to- 
gether and make one very beautiful or ideal soul ? If 
we had to deal with mere blood instead of spirit (and 



/. OF KINGS' TREASURIES. 59 

the thing might literally be done — as it has been 
done with infants before now), — so that it were pos- 
sible by taking a certain quantity of blood from the 
arms of a given number of the mob, and putting it all 
into one person, to make a more azure-blooded gentle- 
man of him, the thing would of course be managed ; 
but secretly, I should conceive. But now, because it 
is brain and soul that we abstract, not visible blood, 
it can be done quite openly, and we live, we gentle- 
men, on delicatest prey, after the manner of weasels ; 
that is to say, we keep a certain number of clowns 
digging and ditching, and generally stupefied, in order 
that we, being fed gratis, may have all the thinking 
and feeling to ourselves. Yet there is a great deal to 
be said for this. A highly bred and trained English, 
French, Austrian, or Italian gentleman (much more 
a lady) is a great production, — a better production 
than most statues ; being beautifully colored as well 
as shaped, and plus all the brains ; a glorious thing to 
look at, a wonderful thing to talk to ; and you cannot 
have it, any more than a pyramid or a church, but by 
sacrifice of much contributed life. And it is, per- 
haps, better to build a beautiful human creature than 
a beautiful dome or steeple — and more delightful to 
look up reverently to a creature far above us, than to 
a wall ; only the beautiful human creature will have 
some duties to do in return — duties of living belfry 
and rampart — of which presently. 



LECTURE II. — LILIES. 
OF queens' gardens. 

" Be thou glad, oh thirsting" Desert ; let the desert be made cheer- 
ful, and bloom as the lily ; and the barren places of Jordan shall run 
wild with wood." — Isaiah xxxv. i. (Septuagint). 

51. It will, perhaps, be well, as this Lecture is the 
sequel of one previously given, that I should shortly 
state to you my general intention in both. The ques- 
tions specially proposed to you in the first, namely, 
How and What to Read, rose out of a far deeper one, 
which it was my endeavor to make you propose ear- 
nestly to yourselves, namely, Why to Read. I want 
you to feel, with me, that whatever advantage we pos- 
sess in the present day in the diffusion of education 
and of literature, can Only be rightly used by any of us 
when we have apprehended clearly what education is 
to lead to, and literature to teach. I wish you to see 
that both well-directed moral training and well-chosen 
reading lead to the possession of a power over the ill- 
guided and illiterate, which is, according to the mea- 
sure of it, in the truest sense, kingly ; conferring indeed 
the purest kingship that can exist among men: too 
many other kingships (however distinguished by visi- 
ble insignia or material power) being either spectral, 
or tyrannous ; — spectral — that is to say, aspects and 
shadows only of royalty, hollow as death, and which 
only the " likeness of a kingly crown have on ; " or else 
tyrannous — that is to say, substituting their own will 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 61 

for the law of justice and love by which all true kings 
rule. 

52. There is, then, I repeat — and as I want to leave 
this idea with you, I begin with it, and shall end with 
it— -only one pure kind of kingship ; an inevitable and 
eternal kind, crowned or not : the kingship, namely, 
which consists in a stronger moral state, and a truer 
thoughtful state, than that of others; enabling you, 
therefore, to guide, or to raise them. Observe that 
word " State ; " we have got into a loose way of using 
it. It means literally the standing and stability of a 
thing ; and you have the full force of it in the derived 
word " statue " — " the immovable thing." A king's 
majesty or " state," then, and the right of his kingdom 
to be called a state, depends on the movelessness of 
both : — without tremor, without quiver of balance ; 
established and enthroned upon a foundation of eternal 
law which nothing can alter, nor overthrow. 

53. Believing that all literature and all education 
are only useful so far as they tend to confirm this 
calm, beneficent, and therefore kingly, power, — first, 
over ourselves, and, through ourselves, over all around 
us, — I am now going to ask you to consider with me, 
farther, what special portion or kind of this royal 
authority, arising out of noble education, may rightly 
be possessed by women ; and how far they also are 
called to a true queenly power, — not in their house- 
holds merely, but over all within their sphere. And 
in what sense, if they rightly understood and exercised 
this royal or gracious influence, the order and beauty 
induced by such benignant power would justify us in 
speaking of the territories over which each of them 
reigned, as " Queens' Gardens." 

54. And here, in the very outset, we are met by a 



62 SESAME AND LILIES. 

far deeper question, which — strange though this may 
seem — remains among many of us yet quite unde- 
cided, in spite of its infinite importance. 

We cannot determine what the queenly power of 
women should be, until we are agreed what their ordi- 
nary power should be. We cannot consider how 
education may fit them for any widely extending duty, 
until we are agreed what is their true constant duty. 
And there never was a time when wilder words were 
spoken, or more vain imagination permitted, respect- 
ing this question — quite vital to all social happiness. 
The relations of the womanly to the manly nature, 
their different capacities of intellect or of virtue, seem 
never to have been yet estimated with entire consent. 
We hear of the " mission " and of the " rights " of 
Woman, as if these could ever be separate from the 
mission and the rights of Man ; — as if she and her 
lord were creatures of independent kind, and of irre- 
concilable claim. This, at least, is wrong. And not 
less wrong — perhaps even more foolishly wrong (for 
I will anticipate thus far what I hope to prove) — is 
the idea that woman is only the shadow and attendant 
image of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and servile 
obedience, and supported altogether in her weakness, 
by the preeminence of his fortitude. 

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respect- 
ing her who was made to be the helpmate of man. As 
if he could be helped effectively by a shadow, or 
worthily by a slave ! 

55. Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some 
clear and harmonious idea (it must be harmonious if 
it is true) of what womanly mind and virtue are in 
power and office, with respect to man's ; and how their 
relations, rightly accepted, aid, and increase, the vigor, 
and honor, and authority of both. 



//. OF QUEENS 9 GARDENS. 63 

And now I must repeat one thing I said in the last 
lecture : namely, that the first use of education was to 
enable us to consult with the wisest and the greatest 
men on all points of earnest difficulty. That to use 
books rightly, was to go to them for help : to appeal 
to them when our own knowledge and power of thought 
failed : to be led by them into wider sight — purer 
conception — than our own, and receive from them the 
united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, 
against our solitary and unstable opinion. 

Let us do this now. Let us see whether the greatest, 
the wisest, the purest-hearted of all ages are agreed in 
any wise on this point : let us hear the testimony they 
have left respecting what they held to be the true 
dignity of woman, and her mode of help to man. 

56. And first let us take Shakespeare. 

Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no 
heroes ; — he has only heroines. There is not one 
entirely heroic figure in all his plays, except the slight 
sketch of Henry the Fifth, exaggerated for the pur- 
poses of the stage ; and the still slighter Valentine in 
" The Two Gentlemen of Verona.'' In his labored and 
perfect plays you have no hero. Othello would have 
been one, if his simplicity had not been so great as to 
leave him the prey of every base practice round him ; 
but he is the only example even approximating to the 
heroic type. Coriolanus — Caesar — Antony stand in 
flawed strength, and fall by their vanities ; — Hamlet 
is indolent, and drowsily speculative ; Romeo an impa- 
tient boy ; the Merchant of Venice languidly submis- 
sive to adverse fortune ; Kent, in " King Lear," is en- 
tirely noble at heart, but too rough and unpolished to 
be of true use at the critical time, and he sinks into the 
office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, is yet 



64 SESAME AND LILIES. 

the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, 
saved, by Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play 
that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave 
hope, and errorless purpose ; Cordelia, Desdemona, 
Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine, Perdita, 
Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhaps 
loveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless ; conceived in the 
highest heroic type of humanity. 

57. Then observe, secondly, 

The catastrophe of every play is caused always by 
the folly or fault of a man ; the redemption, if there 
be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, 
failing that, there is none. The catastrophe of King 
Lear is owing to his own want of judgment, his impa- 
tient vanity, his misunderstanding of his children ; the 
virtue of his one true daughter would have saved him 
from all the injuries of the others, unless he had cast 
her away from him ; as it is, she all but saves him. 

Of Othello I need not trace the tale ; nor the one 
weakness of his so mighty love ; nor the inferiority 
of his perceptive intellect to that even of the second 
woman character in the play, the Emilia who dies in 
wild testimony against his error : — 

" Oh, murderous coxcomb ! what should such a fool 
Do with so good a wife ? " 

In "Romeo and Juliet," the wise and brave strat- 
agem of the wife is brought to ruinous issue by the 
reckless impatience of her husband. In " The Win- 
ter's Tale," and in " Cymbeline," the happiness and 
existence of two princely households, lost through 
long years, and imperilled to the death by the folly 
and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed at last 
by the queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 65 

In " Measure for Measure," the foul injustice of the 
judge, and the foul cowardice of the brother, are 
opposed to the victorious truth and adamantine purity 
of a woman. In " Coriolanus," the mother's counsel, 
acted upon in time, would have saved her son from all 
evil ; his momentary f orgetf ulness of it is his ruin ; her 
prayer, at last, granted, saves him — not, indeed, from 
death, but from the curse of living as the destroyer of 
his country. 

And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the 
fickleness of a lover who is a mere wicked child ? — 
of Helena, against the petulance and insult of a care- 
less youth ? — of the patience of Hero, the passion of 
Beatrice, and the calmly devoted wisdom of the " un- 
lessoned girl," who appears among the helplessness, 
the blindness, and the vindictive passions of men, as 
a gentle angel, bringing courage and safety by her 
presence, and defeating the worst malignities of crime 
by what women are fancied most to fail in, — preci- 
sion and accuracy of thought. 

58. Observe, further, among all the principal fig- 
ures in Shakespeare's plays, there is only one weak 
woman — Ophelia ; and it is because she fails Ham- 
let at the critical moment, and is not, and cannot in 
her nature be, a guide to him when he needs her 
most, that all the bitter catastrophe follows. Finally, 
though there are three wicked women among the 
principal figures, Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril, 
they are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to the 
ordinary laws of life ; fatal in their influence also, in 
proportion to the power for good which they have 
abandoned. 

Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare's testimony to 
the position and character of women in human life. 



66 SESAME AND LILIES. 

He represents them as infallibly faithful and wise 
counsellors, — incorruptibly just and pure examples, 
— strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot 
save. 

59. Not as in any wise comparable in knowledge 
of the nature of man, — still less in his understand- 
ing of the causes and courses of fate, — but only as 
the writer who has given us the broadest view of the 
conditions and modes of ordinary thought in modern 
society, I ask you next to receive the witness of Wal- 
ter Scott. 

I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as 
of no value, and though the early romantic poetry is 
very beautiful, its testimony is of no weight, other 
than that of a boy's ideal. But his true works, stud- 
ied from Scottish life, bear a true witness; and, in 
the whole range of these, there are but three men who 
reach the heroic type 1 — Dandie Dinmont, Rob Roy, 
and Claverhouse ; of these, one is a border farmer ; 
another a freebooter; the third a soldier in a bad 
cause. And these touch the ideal of heroism only 
in their courage and faith, together with a strong, 
but uncultivated, or mistakenly applied, intellectual 
power; while his younger men are the gentlemanly 
playthings of fantastic fortune, and only by aid (or 

1 I ought, in order to make this assertion fully understood, 
to have noted the various weaknesses which lower the ideal of 
other great characters of men in the Waverley novels — the 
selfishness and narrowness of thought in Redgauntlet, the weak 
religious enthusiasm in Edward Glendinning, and the like; and 
I ought to have noticed that there are several quite perfect 
characters sketched sometimes in the backgrounds; three — let 
us accept joyously this courtesy to England and her soldiers — 
are English officers: Colonel Gardiner, Colonel Talbot, and 
Colonel Mannering. 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 67 

accident) of that fortune, survive, not vanquish, the 
trials they involuntarily sustain. Of any disciplined, 
or consistent character, earnest in a purpose wisely 
conceived, or dealing with forms of hostile evil, defi- 
nitely challenged and resolutely subdued, there is no 
trace in his conceptions of young men. Whereas in 
his imaginations of women, — in the characters of 
Ellen Douglas, of Flora Maclvor, Rose Bradwardine, 
Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon, Lilias Redgauntlet, 
Alice Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans, — 
with endless varieties of grace, tenderness, and intel- 
lectual power, we find in all a quite infallible sense 
of dignity and justice ; a fearless, instant, and untir- 
ing self-sacrifice, to even the appearance of duty, much 
more to its real claims ; and, finally, a patient wisdom 
of deeply restrained affection, which does infinitely 
more than protect its objects from a momentary 
error; it gradually forms, animates, and exalts the 
characters of the unworthy lovers, until, at the close 
of the tale, we are just able, and no more, to take 
patience in hearing of their unmerited success. 

So that, in all cases, with Scott as with Shake- 
speare, it is the woman who watches over, teaches, 
and guides the youth ; it is never, by any chance, the 
youth who watches over, or educates, his mistress. 

60. Next, take, though more briefly, graver testi- 
mony — that of the great Italians and Greeks. You 
know well the plan of Dante's great poem — that it 
is a love-poem to his dead lady ; a song of praise for 
her watch over his soul. Stooping only to pity, never 
to love, she yet saves him from destruction — saves 
him from hell. He is going eternally astray in de- 
spair ; she comes down from heaven to his help, and 
throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, in- 



68 SESAME AND LILIES. 

terpreting for him the most difficult truths, divine 
and human ; and leading him, with rebuke upon re- 
buke, from star to star. 

I do not insist upon Dante's conception ; if I began, 
I could not cease : besides, you might think this 
a wild imagination of one poet's heart. So I will 
rather read to you a few verses of the deliberate writ- 
ing of a knight of Pisa to his living lady, wholly 
characteristic of the feeling of all the noblest men of 
the thirteenth, or early fourteenth, century, preserved 
among many other such records of knightly honor 
and love, which Dante Rossetti has gathered for us 
from among the early Italian poets. 

" For lo ! thy law is passed 
That this my love should manifestly be 

To serve and honor thee: 
And so I do ; and my delight is full, 
Accepted for the servant of thy rule. 

" Without almost, I am all rapturous, 
Since thus my will was set: 
To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence : 
Nor ever seems it anything could rouse 
A pain or a regret. 
But on thee dwells my every thought and sense; 
Considering that from thee all virtues spread 
As from a fountain head, — 
That in thy gift is wisdom's best avail, 

And honor without fail; 
With whom each sovereign good dwells separate, 
Fulfilling the perfection of thy state. 

" Lady, since I conceived 
Thy pleasurable aspect in my heart, 
My life has been apart 
In shining brightness and the place of truth; 

Which till that time, good sooth, 
Groped among shadows in a darken'd place, 
Where many hours and days 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 69 

It hardly ever had remember'd good. 

But now my servitude 
Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. 

A man from a wild beast 
Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived." 

61. You may think, perhaps, a Greek knight would 
have had a lower estimate of women than this Chris- 
tian lover. His spiritual subjection to them was indeed 
not so absolute : but as regards their own personal 
character, it was only because you could not have fol- 
lowed me so easily, that I did not take the Greek 
women instead of Shakespeare's ; and instance, for 
chief ideal types of human beauty and faith, the 
simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache ; the 
divine, yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra ; the play- 
ful kindness and simple princess-life of happy Nau- 
sicaa ; the housewifely calm of that of Penelope, with 
its watch upon the sea ; the ever patient, fearless, 
hopelessly devoted piety of the sister and daughter, 
in Antigone ; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb- 
like and silent; and, finally, the expectation of the 
resurrection, made clear to the soul of the Greeks in 
the return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, to 
save her husband, had passed calmly through the bit- 
terness of death. 

62. Now I could multiply witness upon witness of 
this kind upon you if I had time. I would take 
Chaucer, and show you why he wrote a Legend of 
Good Women; but no Legend of Good Men. I 
would take Spenser, and show you how all his fairy 
knights are sometimes deceived and sometimes van- 
quished ; but the soul of Una is never darkened, and 
the spear of Britomart is never broken. Nay, I could 
go back into the mythical teaching of the most an- 



70 SESAME AND LILIES. 

cient times, and show you how the great people — by 
one of whose princesses, it was appointed that the Law- 
giver of all the earth should be educated, rather than 
by his own kindred : — how that great Egyptian peo- 
ple, wisest then of nations, gave to their Spirit of 
Wisdom the form of a woman ; and into her hand, 
for a symbol, the weaver's shuttle ; and how the name 
and the form of that spirit, adopted, believed, and 
obeyed by the Greeks, became that Athena of the olive- 
helm, and cloudy shield, to faith in whom you owe, 
down to this date, whatever you hold most precious 
in art, in literature, or in types of national virtue. 

63. But I will not wander into this distant and 
mythical element ; I will only ask you to give its legit- 
imate value to the testimony of these great poets and 
men of the world, — consistent, as you see it is, on 
this head. I will ask you whether it can be supposed 
that these men, in the main work of their lives, are 
amusing themselves with a fictitious and idle view of 
the relations between man and woman ; nay, worse 
than fictitious or idle ; for a thing may be imaginary, 
yet desirable, if it were possible ; but this, their ideal 
of woman, is, according to our common idea of the 
marriage relation, wholly undesirable. The woman, 
we say, is not to guide, nor even to think for herself. 
The man is always to be the wiser ; he is to be the 
thinker, the ruler, the superior in knowledge and dis- 
cretion, as in power. 

64. Is it not somewhat important to make up our 
minds on this matter ? Are all these great men mis- 
taken, or are we ? Are Shakespeare and iEschylus, 
Dante and Homer, merely dressing dolls for us ; or, 
worse than dolls, unnatural visions, the realization of 
which, were it possible, would bring anarchy into all 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 71 

households and ruin into all affections ? Nay, if you 
can suppose this, take lastly the evidence of facts 
given by the human heart itself. In all Christian 
ages which have been remarkable for their purity of 
progress, there has been absolute yielding of obedient 
devotion, by the lover, to his mistress. I say obedi- 
ent ; — not merely enthusiastic and worshipping in 
imagination, but entirely subject, receiving from the 
beloved woman, however young, not only the encour- 
agement, the praise, and the reward of all toil, but, 
so far as any choice is open, or any question difficult 
of decision, the direction of all toil. That chivalry, 
to the abuse and dishonor of which are attributable 
primarily whatever is cruel in war, unjust in peace, 
or corrupt and ignoble in domestic relations ; and to 
the original purity and power of which we owe the 
defence alike of faith, of law, and of love ; — that 
chivalry, I say, in its very first conception of honor- 
able life assumes the subjection of the young knight 
to the command — should it even be the command in 
caprice — of his lady. It assumes this, because its 
masters knew that the first and necessary impulse of 
every truly taught and knightly heart is this of blind 
service to its lady : that where that true faith and cap- 
tivity are not, all wayward and wicked passion must 
be ; and that in this rapturous obedience to the single 
love of his youth is the sanctification of all man's 
strength, and the continuance of all his purposes. 
And this, not because such obedience would be safe, 
or honorable, were it ever rendered to the unworthy ; 
but because it ought to be impossible for every noble 
youth — it is impossible for every one rightly trained 
— to love any one whose gentle counsel he cannot 
trust, or whose prayerful command he can hesitate to 
obey. 



72 SESAME AND LILIES. 

65. I do not insist by any farther argument on 
this, for I think it should commend itself at once to 
your knowledge of what has been, and to your feeling 
of what should be. You cannot think that the buck- 
ling on of the knight's armor by his lady's hand was 
a mere caprice of romantic fashion. It is the type of 
an eternal truth — that the soul's armor is never well 
set to the heart unless a woman's hand has braced it ; 
and it is only when she braces it loosely that the 
honor of manhood fails. Know you not those lovely 
lines — I would they were learned by all youthful 
ladies of England : — 

" Ah, wasteful woman ! — she who may 
On her sweet self set her own price, 
Knowing he cannot choose but pay — 
How has she cheapen'd Paradise ! 
How given for nought her priceless gift, 
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine, 
Which, spent with due respective thrift, 
Had made brutes men, and men divine ! " x 

66. Thus much, then, respecting the relations of 
lovers I believe you will accept. But what we too 
often doubt is the fitness of the continuance of such a 
relation throughout the whole of human life. We think 
it right in the lover and mistress, not in the husband 
and wife. That is to say, we think that a reverent and 
tender duty is due to one whose affection we still doubt, 
and whose character we as yet do but partially and 
distantly discern ; and that this reverence and duty 
are to be withdrawn, when the affection has become 

1 Coventry Patmore [The Angel in the House"]. You cannot 
read him too often or too carefully; as far as I know, he is the 
only living poet who always strengthens and purines; the others 
sometimes darken and nearly always depress, and discourage the 
imagination they deeply seize. 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 73 

wholly and limitlessly our own, and the character has 
been so sifted and tried that we fear not to entrust it 
with the happiness of our lives. Do you not see how 
ignoble this is, as well as how unreasonable ? Do you 
not feel that marriage — when it is marriage at all — 
is only the seal which marks the' vowed transition of 
temporary into untiring service, and of fitful into 
eternal love? 

67. But how, you will ask, is the idea of this guid- 
ing function of the woman reconcilable with a true 
wifely subjection ? Simply in that it is a guiding, 
not a determining function. Let me try to show you 
briefly how these powers seem to be rightly distin- 
guishable. 

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speak- 
ing of the " superiority " of one sex to the other, as if 
they could be compared in similar things. Each has 
what the other has not : each completes the other, 
and is completed by the other : they are in nothing 
alike, and the happiness and perfection of both de- 
pends on each asking and receiving from the other 
what the other only can give. 

68. Now their separate characters are briefly these. 
The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. 
He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, 
the defender. His intellect is for speculation and in- 
vention ; his energy for adventure, for war, and for 
conquest wherever war is just, wherever conquest 
necessary. But the woman's power is for rule, not 
for battle, — and her intellect is not for invention or 
creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and 
decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims, 
and their places. Her great function is Praise : she 
enters into no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown 



74 SESAME AND LILIES. 

of contest. By her office and place, she is protected 
from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough 
work in the open world, must encounter all peril 
and trial : — to him, therefore, must be the failure, 
the offence, the inevitable error : often he must be 
wounded, or subdued ; often misled ; and always hard- 
ened. But he guards the woman from all this ; within 
his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has 
sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause 
of error or offence. This is the true nature of home — 
it is the place of Peace ; the shelter, not only from all 
injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so 
far as it is not this, it is not home ; so far as the anxie- 
ties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsist- 
ently-minded, unknown, unloved, or hostile society of 
the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife 
to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home ; it is then 
only a part of that outer world which you have roofed 
over, and lighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred 
place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched 
over by Household Gods, before whose faces none may 
come but those whom they can receive with love, — so 
far as it is this, and roof and fire are types only of a 
nobler shade and light, — shade as of the rock in a 
weary land, and light as of the Pharos in the stormy 
sea ; — so far it vindicates the name, and fulfils the 
praise, of Home. 

And wherever a true wife comes, this home is al- 
ways round her. The stars only may be over her 
head ; the glowworm in the night-cold grass may be 
the only fire at her foot : but home is yet wherever she 
is ; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her ; 
better than ceiled with cedar, or painted with vermil- 
ion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who else 
were homeless. 



//. OF QUEENS 9 GARDENS. 75 

69. This, then, I believe to be — will you not 
admit it to bb ? — the woman's true place and power. 
But do not you see that, to fulfil this, she must — as 
far as one can use such terms of a human creature — 
be incapable of error ? So far as she rules, all must 
be right, or nothing is. She must be enduringly, in- 
corruptibly good ; instinctively, infallibly wise — wise, 
not for self -development, but for self-renunciation : 
wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, 
but that she may never fail from his side : wise, not 
with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, 
but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely 
variable, because infinitely applicable, modesty of ser- 
vice — the true changefulness of woman. In that 
great sense — " La donna e mobile," 1 not " Qual 
piiim' al vento ; " no, nor yet " Variable as the shade, 
by the light, quivering aspen made ; " but variable as 
the light, manifold in fair and serene division, that 
it may take the color of all that it falls upon, and 
exalt it. 

70. II. I have been trying, thus far, to show you 
what should be the place, and what the power, of 
woman. Now, secondly, we ask, What kind of educa- 
tion is to fit her for these ? 

And if you indeed think this a true conception of 
her office and dignity, it will not be difficult to trace 
the course of education which would fit her for the one, 
and raise her to the other. 

The first of our duties to her — no thoughtful per- 
sons now doubt this — is to secure for her such phy- 
sical training and exercise as may confirm her health, 
and perfect her beauty; the highest refinement of 
that beauty being unattainable without splendor of 

[ x Woman is fickle, not like a feather stirred by the wind.] 



76 SESAME AND LILIES. 

activity and of delicate strength. To perfect her 
beauty, I say, and increase its power ; it cannot be 
too powerful, nor shed its sacred light too far : only 
remember that all physical freedom is vain to pro- 
duce beauty without a corresponding freedom of heart. 
There are two passages of that poet who is distin- 
guished, it seems to me, from all others — not by 
power, but by exquisite Tightness — which point you 
to the source, and describe to you, in a few syllables, 
the completion of womanly beauty. I will read the 
introductory stanzas, but the last is the one I wish 
you specially to notice : — 

" Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
Then Nature said, ' A lovelier flower 
1 On earth was never sown ; 

* This child I to myself will take ; 

* She shall be mine, and I will make 

* A lady of my own. 

" ' Myself will to my darling be 
' Both law and impulse ; and with me 

' The girl, in rock and plain, 
4 In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 

* Shall feel an overseeing power 

4 To kindle, or restrain. 

" * The floating clouds their state shall lend 
' To her, for her the willow bend ; 

1 Nor shall she fail to see 
' Even in the motions of the storm, 
' Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 

* By silent sympathy. 

" 'And vital feelings of delight 
i Shall rear her form to stately height, — 

' Her virgin bosom swell. 
' Such thoughts to Lucy I will give, 



II. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 77 

1 While she and I together live, 
6 Here in this happy dell.' " x 

" Vital feelings of delight," observe. There are 
deadly feelings of delight ; but the natural ones are 
vital, necessary to very life. 

And they must be feelings of delight, if they are 
to be vital. Do not think you can make a girl lovely 
if you do not make her happy. There is not one 
restraint you put on a good girl's nature — there is 
not one check you give to her instincts of affection or 
of effort — which will not be indelibly written on her 
features, with a hardness which is all the more painful 
because it takes away the brightness from the eyes of 
innocence, and the charm from the brow of virtue. 

71. This for the means : now note the end. Take 
from the same poet, in two lines, a perfect description 
of womanly beauty — 

" A countenance in which did meet 
Sweet records, promises as sweet." 

The perfect loveliness of a woman's countenance 
can only consist in that majestic peace which is founded 
in memory of happy and useful years, — full of sweet 
records ; and from the joining of this with that yet 
more majestic childishness, which is still full of change 
and promise ; — opening always — modest at once, and 
bright, with hope of better things to be won, and to be 
bestowed. There is no old age where there is still that 
promise. 

72. Thus, then, you have first to mould her physi- 
cal frame, and then, as the strength she gains will 
permit you, to fill and temper her mind with all know- 

1 Observe, it is " Nature " who is speaking throughout, and 
who says, " while she and I together live." [The verses are 
Wordsworth's.] 



78 SESAME AND LILIES, 

ledge and thoughts which tend to confirm its natural 
instincts of justice, and refine its natural tact of love. 
All such knowledge should be given her as may 
enable her to understand, and even to aid, the work 
of men : and yet it should be given, not as knowledge, 
— not as if it were, or could be, for her an object 
to know ; but only to feel, and to judge. It is of no 
moment, as a matter of pride or perf ectness in herself, 
whether she knows many languages or one ; but it is 
of the utmost, that she should be able to show kind- 
ness to a stranger, and to understand the sweetness of 
a stranger's tongue. It is of no moment to her own 
worth or dignity that she should be acquainted with 
this science or that ; but it is of the highest that she 
should be trained in habits of accurate thought ; that 
she should understand the meaning, the inevitableness, 
and the loveliness of natural laws ; and follow at least 
some one path of scientific attainment, as far as to the 
threshold of that bitter Valley of Humiliation, into 
which only the wisest and bravest of men can descend, 
owning themselves forever children, gathering peb- 
bles on a boundless shore. It is of little consequence 
how many positions of cities she knows, or how many 
dates of events, or names of celebrated persons — it is 
not the object of education to turn the woman into a 
dictionary ; but it is deeply necessary that she should 
be taught to enter with her whole personality into the 
history she reads ; to picture the passages of it vitally 
in her own bright imagination ; to apprehend, with 
her fine instincts, the pathetic circumstances and dra- 
matic relations, which the historian too often eclipses 
by his reasoning, and disconnects by his arrangement : 
it is for her to trace the hidden equities of divine re- 
ward, and catch sight, through the darkness, of the 



77. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 79 

fateful threads of woven fire that connect error with 
retribution. But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to 
extend the limits of her sympathy with respect to that 
history which is being forever determined as the mo- 
ments pass in which she draws her peaceful breath ; 
and to the contemporary calamity, which, were it but 
rightly mourned by her, would recur no more here- 
after. She is to exercise herself in imagining what 
would be the effects upon her mind and conduct, if she 
were daily brought into the presence of the suffering 
which is not the less real because shut from her sight. 
She is to be taught somewhat to understand the no- 
thingness of the proportion which that little world in 
which she lives and loves, bears to the world in which 
God lives and loves ; — and solemnly she is to be 
taught to strive that her thoughts of piety may not be 
feeble in proportion to the number they embrace, nor 
her prayer more languid than it is for the momentary 
relief from pain of her husband or her child, when it 
is uttered for the multitudes of those who have none 
to love them, — and is, " for all who are desolate and 
oppressed." 

73. Thus far, I think, I have had your concurrence ; 
perhaps you will not be with me in what I believe is 
most needful for me to say. There is one dangerous 
science for women — one which they must indeed 
beware how they profanely touch — that of theology. 
Strange, and miserably strange, that while they are 
modest enough to doubt their powers, and pause at 
the threshold of sciences where every step is demon- 
strable and sure, they will plunge headlong, and with- 
out one thought of incompetency, into that science in 
which the greatest men have trembled, and the wisest 
erred. Strange, that they will complacently and pride- 



80 SESAME AND LILIES. 

fully bind up whatever vice or folly there is in them, 
whatever arrogance, petulance, or blind incomprehen- 
siveness, into one bitter bundle of consecrated myrrh. 
Strange in creatures born to be Love visible, that 
where they can know least, they will condemn first, 
and think to recommend themselves to their Master, 
by crawling up the steps of His judgment-throne, to 
divide it with Him. Strangest of all, that they should 
think they were led by the Spirit of the Comforter 
into habits of mind which have become in them the 
unmixed elements of home discomfort ; and that they 
dare to turn the Household Gods of Christianity into 
ugly idols of their own ; — spiritual dolls, for them to 
dress according to their caprice ; and from which their 
husbands must turn away in grieved contempt, lest 
they should be shrieked at for breaking them. 

74. I believe, then, with this exception, that a girl's 
education should be nearly, in its course and material 
of study, the same as a boy's ; but quite differently 
directed. A woman, in any rank of life, ought to 
know whatever her husband is likely to know, but to 
know it in a different way. His command of it should 
be foundational and progressive; hers, general and 
accomplished for daily and helpful use. Not but that 
it would often be wiser in men to learn^hings in a 
womanly sort of way, for present use, and to seek for 
the discipline and training of their mental powers in 
such branches of study as will be afterwards fittest for 
social service ; but, speaking broadly, a man ought to 
know any language or science he learns, thoroughly — 
while a woman ought to know the same language, or 
science, only so far as may enable her to sympathize 
in her husband's pleasures, and in those of his best 
friends. 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 81 

75. Yet, observe, with exquisite accuracy as far as 
she reaches. There is a wide difference between ele- 
mentary knowledge and superficial knowledge — be- 
tween a firm beginning, and an infirm attempt at 
compassing. A woman may always help her husband 

•by what she knows, however little ; by what she half- 
knows, or mis-knows, she will only tease him. 

And indeed, if there were to be any difference 
between a girl's education and a boy's, I should say 
that of the two the girl should be earlier led, as her 
intellect ripens faster, into deep and serious subjects : 
and that her range of literature should be, not more, 
but less frivolous ; calculated to add the qualities of 
patience and seriousness to her natural poignancy of 
thought and quickness of wit ; and also to keep her 
in a lofty and pure element of thought. I enter not 
now into any question of choice of books ; only let us 
be sure that her books are not heaped up in her lap 
as they fall out of the package of the circulating 
library, wet with the last and lightest spray of the 
fountain of folly. 

76. Or even of the fountain of wit; for with respect 
to the sore temptation of novel-reading, it is not the 
badness of a novel that we should dread, so much as 
its overwrought interest. The weakest romance is not 
so stupefying as the lower forms of religious exciting 
literature, and the worst romance is not so corrupting 
as false history, false philosophy, or false political 
essays. But the best romance becomes dangerous, if, 
by its excitement, it renders the ordinary course of 
life uninteresting, and increases the morbid thirst for 
useless acquaintance with scenes in which we shall 
never be called upon to act. 

77. I speak therefore of good novels only ; and our 



82 SESAME AND LILIES. 

modern literature is particularly rich in types of such. 
Well read, indeed, these books have serious use, being 
nothing less than treatises on moral anatomy and 
chemistry ; studies of human nature in the elements 
of it. But I attach little weight to this function ; 
they are hardly ever read with earnestness enough to 
permit them to fulfil it. The utmost they usually do 
is to enlarge somewhat the charity of a kind reader, 
or the bitterness of a malicious one ; for each will 
gather, from the novel, food for her own disposition. 
Those who are naturally proud and envious will learn 
from Thackeray to despise humanity ; those who are 
naturally gentle, to pity it ; those who are naturally 
shallow, to laugh at it. So, also, there might be a 
serviceable power in novels to bring before us, in 
vividness, a human truth which we had before dimly 
conceived ; but the temptation to picturesqueness of 
statement is so great, that often the best writers of 
fiction cannot resist it ; and our views are rendered 
so violent and one-sided, that their vitality is rather a 
harm than good. 

78. Without, however, venturing here on any at- 
tempt at decision how much novel-reading should be 
allowed, let me at least clearly assert this, that whether 
novels, or poetry, or history be read, they should be 
chosen, not for their freedom from evil, but for their 
possession of good. The chance and scattered evil 
that may here and there haunt, or hide itself in, a 
powerful book, never does any harm to a noble girl ; 
but the emptiness of an author oppresses her, and 
his amiable folly degrades her. And if she can have 
access to a good library of old and classical books, 
there need be no choosing at all. Keep the modern 
magazine and novel out of your girl's way ; turn her 



II. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 83 

loose into the old library every wet day, and let her 
alone. She will find what is good for her ; you can- 
not ; for there is just this difference between the 
making of a girl's character and a boy's — you may 
chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or ham- 
mer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you 
would a piece of bronze. But you cannot hammer 
a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does, — 
she will wither without sun ; she will decay in her 
sheath, as a narcissus will, if you do not give her air 
enough ; she may fall, and defile her head in dust, if 
you leave her without help at some moments of her 
life ; but you cannot fetter her ; she must take her 
own fair form and way, if she take any, and in mind 
as in body, must have always 

" Her household motions light and free, 
And steps of virgin liberty." 

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn 
in the field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times 
better than you ; and the good ones too, and will eat 
some bitter and prickly ones, good for it, which you 
had not the slightest thought would have been so. 

79. Then, in art, keep the finest models before her, 
and let her practice in all accomplishments be accu- 
rate and thorough, so as to enable her to understand 
more than she accomplishes. I say the finest models 
— that is to say, the truest, simplest, usefullest. Note 
those epithets ; they will range through all the arts. 
Try them in music, where you might think them the 
least applicable. I say the truest, that in which the 
notes most closely and faithfully express the meaning of 
the words, or the character of intended emotion ; again, 
the simplest, that in which the meaning and melody 



84 SESAME AND LILIES. 

are attained with the fewest and most significant notes 
possible ; and, finally, the usefullest, that music which 
makes the best words most beautiful, which enchants 
them in our memories each with its own glory of 
sound, and which applies them closest to the heart at 
the moment we need them. 

80. And not only in the material and in the course, 
but yet more earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl's 
education be as serious as a boy's. You bring up 
your girls as if they were meant for sideboard orna- 
ments, and then complain of their frivolity. Give them 
the same advantages that you give their brothers — 
appeal to the same grand instincts of virtue in them ; 
teach them, also, that courage and truth are the pillars 
of their being : — do you think that they would not 
answer that appeal, brave and true as they are even 
now, when you know that there is hardly a girls' school 
in this Christian kingdom where the children's courage 
or sincerity would be thought of half so much impor- 
tance as their way of coming in at a door ; and when 
the whole system of society, as respects the mode of 
establishing them in life, is one rotten plague of cow- 
ardice and imposture — cowardice, in not daring to let 
them live, or love, except as their neighbors choose ; 
an imposture, in bringing, for the purposes of our own 
pride, the full glow of the world's worst vanity upon a 
girl's eyes, at the very period when the whole happi- 
ness of her future existence depends upon her remain- 
ing undazzled ? 

81. And give them, lastly, not only noble teachings, 
but noble teachers. You consider somewhat, before 
you send your boy to school, what kind of man the 
master is ; — whatsoever kind of a man he is, you at 
least give him full authority over your son, and show 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 85 

some respect to him yourself : — if he comes to dine 
with you, you do not put him at a side table: you 
know also that, at college, your child's immediate tutor 
will be under the direction of some still higher tutor, 
for whom you have absolute reverence. You do not 
treat the Dean of Christ Church or the Master of 
Trinity as your inferiors. 

But what teachers do you give your girls, and what 
reverence do you show to the teachers you have chosen ? 
Is a girl likely to think her own conduct, or her own 
intellect, of much importance, when you trust the entire 
formation of her character, moral and intellectual, to 
a person whom you let your servants treat with less 
respect than they do your housekeeper (as if the soul 
of your child were a less charge than jams and grocer- 
ies), and whom you yourself think you confer an honor 
upon by letting her sometimes sit in the drawing-room 
in the evening ? * 

82. Thus, then, of literature as her help and thus of 
art. There is one more help which she cannot do with- 
out — one which, alone, has sometimes done more than 
all other influences besides, — the help of wild and fair 
nature. Hear this of the education of Joan of Arc : — 

" The education of this poor girl was mean, according to 
the present standard ; was ineffably grand, according to a 
purer philosophical standard ; and only not good for our 
age, because for us it would be unattainable. . . . 

" Next after her spiritual advantages, she owed most to 
the advantages of her situation. The fountain of Dom- 
rerny was on the brink of a boundless forest ; and it was 
haunted to that degree by fairies, that the parish priest 
(cure) was obliged to read mass there once a year, in order 
to keep them in decent bounds. . . . 

[} Ruskin has clearly before his mind English society, with the 
governess as the teacher of the household.] 



86 SESAME AND LILIES. 

" But the forests of Domremy — those were the glories 
of the land ; for in them abode mysterious powers and an- 
cient secrets that towered into tragic strength. ' Abbeys 
there were, and abbey windows/ — ' like Moorish temples of 
the Hindoos/ — that exercised even princely power both in 
Touraine and in the German Diets. These had their sweet 
bells that pierced the forests for many a league at matins or 
vespers, and each its own dreamy legend. Few enough, 
and scattered enough, were these abbeys, so as in no degree 
to disturb the deep solitude of the region ; yet many enough 
to spread a network or awning of Christian sanctity over 
what else might have seemed a heathen wilderness." 1 

Now, you cannot, indeed, have here in England, 
woods eighteen miles deep to the centre; but you 
can, perhaps, keep a fairy or two for your children 
yet, if you wish to keep them. But do you wish it ? 
Suppose you had each, at the back of your houses, a 
garden, large enough for your children to play in, 
with just as much lawn as would give them room to 
run, — no more, — and that you could not change 
your abode ; but that, if you chose, you could double 
your income, or quadruple it, by digging a coal shaft 
in the middle of the lawn, and turning the flower-beds 
into heaps of coke. Would you do it ? I hope not. 
I can tell you, you would be wrong if you did, though 
it gave you income sixty-fold instead of four-fold. 

83. Yet this is what you are doing with all Eng- 
land. The whole country is but a little garden, not 
more than enough for your children to run on the 
lawns of, if you would let them all run there. And 
this little garden you will turn into furnace ground, 
and fill with heaps of cinders, if you can ; and those 

1 ' * Joan of Arc : in reference to M. Michelet's History of 
France." — Thomas De Quincey. 



//. OF QUEENS 9 GARDENS. 87 

children of yours, not you, will suffer for it. For the 
fairies will not be all banished ; there are fairies of 
the furnace as of the wood, and their first gift seems 
to be " sharp arrows of the mighty ; " but their last 
gifts are " coals of juniper." 

84. And yet I cannot — though there is no part of 
my subject that I feel more — press this upon you ; 
for we made so little use of the power of nature while 
we had it that we shall hardly feel what we have lost. 
Just on the other side of the Mersey you have your 
Snowdon, and your Menai Straits, and that mighty 
granite rock beyond the moors of Anglesea, splendid 
in its heathery crest, and foot planted in the deep 
sea, once thought of as sacred — a divine promontory, 
looking westward ; the Holy Head or Headland, still 
not without awe when its red light glares first through 
storm. These are the hills, and these the bays and 
blue inlets, which, among the Greeks, would have 
been always loved, always fateful in influence on the 
national mind. That Snowdon is your Parnassus ; 
but where are its Muses ? That Holyhead mountain 
is your Island of JEgina ; but where is its Temple to 
Minerva ? 

85. Shall I read you what the Christian Minerva 
had achieved under the shadow of our Parnassus up 
to the year 1848? — Here is a little account of a 
Welsh school, from page 261 of the Report on Wales, 
published by the Committee of Council on Education. 
This is a school close to a town containing 5000 
persons : — 

" I then called up a larger class, most of whom had re- 
cently come to the school. Three girls repeatedly declared 
they had never heard of Christ, and two that they had 
never heard of God. Two out of six thought Christ was 



88 SESAME AND LILIES, 

on earth now " (they might have had a worse thought, per- 
haps), " three knew nothing about the Crucifixion. Four out 
of seven did not know the names of the months nor the num- 
ber of days in a year. They had no notion of addition, 
beyond two and two, or three and three ; their minds were 
perfect blanks." 

Oh, ye women of England ! from the Princess of 
that Wales to the simplest of you, do not think your 
own children can be brought into their true fold of 
rest, while these are scattered on the hills, as sheep 
having no shepherd. And do not think your daugh- 
ters can be trained to the truth of their own human 
beauty, while the pleasant places, which God made 
at once for their school-room and their play-ground, 
lie desolate and defiled. You cannot baptize them 
rightly in those inch-deep fonts of yours, unless you 
baptize them also in the sweet waters which the great 
Lawgiver strikes forth forever from the rocks of 
your native land — waters which a Pagan would have 
worshipped in their purity, and you worship only 
with pollution. You cannot lead your children faith- 
fully to those narrow axe-hewn church altars of yours, 
while the dark azure altars in heaven — the moun- 
tains that sustain your island throne — mountains on 
which a Pagan would have seen the powers of heaven 
rest in every wreathed cloud — remain for you with- 
out inscription ; altars built, not to, but by, an Un- 
known God. 

86. III. Thus far, then, of the nature, thus far of 
the teaching, of woman, and thus of her household 
office, and queenliness. We come now to our last, 
our widest question, — What is her queenly office 
with respect to the state ? 

Generally, we are under an impression that a man's 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 89 

duties are public, and a woman's private. But this 
is not altogether so. A man has a personal work or 
duty, relating to his own home, and a public work or 
duty, which is the expansion of the other, relating to 
the state. So a woman has a personal work or duty, 
relating to her own home, and a public work or duty, 
which is also the expansion of that. 

Now, the man's work for his own home is, as has 
been said, to secure its maintenance, progress, and 
defence ; the woman's to secure its order, comfort, 
and loveliness. 

Expand both these functions. The man's duty, as 
a member of a commonwealth, is to assist in the main- 
tenance, in the advance, in the defence of the state. 
The woman's duty, as a member of the commonwealth, 
is to assist in the ordering, in the comforting, and in 
the beautiful adornment of the state. 

What the man is at his own gate, defending it, if 
need be, against insult and spoil, that also, not in a 
less, but in a more devoted measure, he is to be at the 
gate of his country, leaving his home, if need be, even 
to the spoiler, to do his more incumbent work there. 

And, in like manner, what the woman is to be 
within her gates, as the centre of order, the balm of 
distress, and the mirror of beauty : that she is also 
to be without her gates, where order is more difficult, 
distress more imminent, loveliness more r^re. 

And as within the human heart there is always set 
an instinct for all its real duties, — an instinct which 
you cannot quench, but only warp and corrupt if you 
withdraw it from its true purpose : — as there is the 
intense instinct of love, which, rightly disciplined, 
maintains all the sanctities of life, and, misdirected, 
undermines them ; and must do either the one or the 



90 SESAME AND LILIES. 

other ; — so there is in the human heart an inextin- 
guishable instinct, the love of power, which, rightly 
directed, maintains all the majesty of law and life, 
and, misdirected, wrecks them. 

87. Deep rooted in the innermost life of the heart 
of man, and of the heart of woman, God set it there, 
and God keeps it there. Vainly, as falsely, you 
blame or rebuke the desire of power ! — For Heaven's 
sake, and for Man's sake, desire it all you can. But 
what power? That is all the question. Power to 
destroy? the lion's limb, and the dragon's breath? 
Not so. Power to heal, to redeem, to guide, and to 
guard. Power of the sceptre and shield ; the power 
of the royal hand that heals in touching, — that binds 
the fiend, and looses the captive ; the throne that is 
founded on the rock of Justice, and descended from 
only by steps of Mercy. Will you not covet such 
power as this, and seek such throne as this, and be no 
more housewives, but queens ? 

88. It is now long since the women of England 
arrogated, universally, a title which once belonged to 
nobility only ; and having once been in the habit of 
accepting the simple title of gentlewoman, as corre- 
spondent to that of gentleman, insisted on the privi- 
lege of assuming the title of " Lady, " l which properly 
corresponds only to the title of " Lord." 

1 I wish there were a true order of chivalry instituted for 
our English youth of certain ranks, in which both boy and girl 
should receive, at a given age, their knighthood and ladyhood by 
true title ; attainable only by certain probation and trial both of 
character and accomplishment ; and to be forfeited, on convic- 
tion, by their peers, of any dishonorable act. Such an institu- 
tion would be entirely, and with all noble results, possible, in a 
nation which loved honor. That it would not be possible among 
us, is not to the discredit of the scheme. 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 91 

I do not blame them for this ; but only for their 
narrow motive in this. I would have them desire and 
claim the title of Lady, provided they claim, not 
merely the title, but the office and duty signified by 
it. Lady means " bread-giver " or " loaf-giver," and 
Lord means "maintainer of laws," and both titles 
have reference, not to the law which is maintained in 
the house, nor to the bread which is given to the 
household ; but to law maintained for the multitude, 
and to bread broken among the multitude. So that a 
Lord has legal claim only to his title in so far as he 
is the maintainer of the justice of the Lord of Lords ; 
and a Lady has legal claim to her title, only so far as 
she communicates that help to the poor representa- 
tives of her Master, which women once, ministering 
to Him of their substance, were permitted to extend 
to that Master Himself ; and when she is known, as 
He Himself once was, in breaking of bread. 

89. And this beneficent and legal dominion, this 
power of the Dominus, or House-Lord, and of the 
Domina, or House-Lady, is great and venerable, not 
in the number of those through whom it has lineally 
descended, but in the number of those whom it grasps 
within its sway ; it is always regarded with reverent 
worship wherever its dynasty is founded on its duty, 
and its ambition correlative with its beneficence. Your 
fancy is pleased with the thought of being noble ladies, 
with a train of vassals ? Be it so ; you cannot be too 
noble, and your train cannot be too great ; but see to 
it that your train is of vassals whom you serve and 
feed, not merely of slaves who serve and feed you ; 
and that the multitude which obeys you is of those 
whom you have comforted, not oppressed, — whom you 
have redeemed, not led into captivity. 



92 SESAME AND LILIES. 

90. And this, which is true of the lower or house- 
hold dominion, is equally true of the queenly domin- 
ion ; — that highest dignity is open to you, if you will 
also accept that highest duty. Rex et Regina — Roi 
et Reine — " Hight-doers ; " they differ but from the 
Lady and Lord, in that their power is supreme over 
the mind as over the person — that they not only feed 
and clothe, but direct and teach. And whether con- 
sciously or not, you must be, in many a heart, en- 
throned : there is no putting by that crown ; queens 
you must always be ; queens to your lovers ; queens 
to your husbands and your sons ; queens of higher 
mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and 
will forever bow, before the myrtle crown, and the 
stainless sceptre of womanhood. But, alas! you are 
too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty 
in the least things, while you abdicate it in the great- 
est ; and leaving misrule and violence to work their 
will among men, in defiance of the power which, hold- 
ing straight in gift from the Prince of all Peace, the 
wicked among you betray, and the good forget. 

91. " Prince of Peace." Note that name. When 
kings rule in that name, and nobles, and the judges 
of the earth, they also, in their narrow place, and 
mortal measure, receive the power of it. There are 
no other rulers than they: other rule than theirs is 
but misrule; they who govern verily " Dei gratia" 
are all princes, yes, or princesses, of Peace. There is 
not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you 
women are answerable for it ; not in that you have 
provoked, but in that you have not hindered. Men, 
by their nature, are prone to fight ; they will fight for 
any cause, or for none. It is for you to choose their 
cause for them, and to forbid them when there is no 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 93 

cause. There is no suffering, no injustice, no misery 
in the earth, but the guilt of it lies with you. Men 
can bear the sight of it, but you should not be able to 
bear it. Men may tread it down without sympathy 
in their own struggle; but men are feeble in sym- 
pathy, and contracted in hope ; it is you only who can 
feel the depths of pain, and conceive the way of its 
healing. Instead of trying to do this, you turn away 
from it ; you shut yourselves within your park walls 
and garden gates ; and you are content to know that 
there is beyond them a whole world in wilderness — a 
world of secrets which you dare not penetrate, and of 
suffering which you dare not conceive. 

92. I tell you that this is to me quite the most 
amazing among the phenomena of humanity. I am 
surprised at no depths to which, when once warped 
from its honor, that humanity can be degraded. I do 
not wonder at the miser's death, with his hands, as 
they relax, dropping gold. I do not wonder at the 
sensualist's life, with the shroud wrapped about his 
feet. I do not wonder at the single-handed murder of 
a single victim, done by the assassin in the darkness 
of the railway, or reed-shadow of the marsh. I do 
not even wonder at the myriad-handed murder of 
multitudes, done boastfully in the daylight, by the 
frenzy of nations, and the immeasurable, unimagin- 
able guilt, heaped up from hell to heaven, of their 
priests, and kings. But this is wonderful to me — 
oh, how wonderful ! — to see the tender and delicate 
woman among you, with her child at her breast, and 
a power, if she would wield it, over it, and over its 
father, purer than the air of heaven, and stronger 
than the seas of earth — nay a magnitude of blessing 
which her husband would not part with for all that 



94 SESAME AND LILIES. 

earth itself, though it were made of one entire and 
perfect chrysolite : — to see her abdicate this majesty 
to play at precedence with her next-door neighbor ! 
This is wonderful — oh, wonderful ! — to see her, with 
every innocent feeling fresh within her, go out in the 
morning into her garden to play with the fringes of 
its guarded flowers, and lift their heads when they are 
drooping, with her happy smile upon her face, and no 
cloud upon her brow, because there is a little wall 
around her place of peace ; and yet she knows, in her 
heart, if she would only look for its knowledge, that, 
outside of that little rose-covered wall, the wild-grass, 
to the horizon, is torn up by the agony of men, and 
beat level by the drift of their life-blood. 

93. Have you ever considered what a deep under- 
meaning there lies, or at least may be read, if we choose, 
in our custom of strewing flowers before those whom 
we think most happy ? Do you suppose it is merely 
to deceive them into the hope that happiness is always 
to fall thus in showers at their feet ? — that wher- 
ever they pass they will tread on herbs of sweet scent, 
and that the rough ground will be made smooth for 
them by depth of roses ! So surely as they believe 
that, they will have, instead, to walk on bitter herbs 
and thorns ; and the only softness to their feet will be 
of snow. But it is not thus intended they should 
believe ; there is a better meaning in that old custom. 
The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with 
flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before 
them. " Her feet have touched the meadows, and 
left the daisies rosy." 

94. You think that only a lover's fancy ; — false 
and vain ? How if it could be true ? You think this 
also, perhaps, only a poet's fancy — 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 95 

" Even the light harebell raised its head 
Elastic from her airy tread." 

But it is little to say of a woman, that she only does 
not destroy where she passes. She should revive ; 
the harebells should bloom, not stoop, as she passes. 
You think I am rushing into wild hyperbole ? Par- 
don me, not a whit — I mean what I say in calm 
English, spoken in resolute truth. You have heard it 
said — (and I believe there is more than fancy even 
in that saying, but let it pass for a fanciful one) — 
that flowers only flourish rightly in the garden of some 
one who loves them. I know you would like that to 
be true ; you would think it a pleasant magic if you 
could flush your flowers into brighter bloom by a kind 
look upon them : nay, more, if your look had the 
power, not only to cheer, but to guard ; — if you could 
bid the black blight turn away, and the knotted cater- 
pillar spare — if you could bid the dew fall upon them 
in thg drought, and say to the south wind, in frost — 
"Come, thou south, and breathe upon my garden, 
that the spices of it may flow out." This you would 
think a great thing? And do you think it not a 
greater thing, that all this (and how much more than 
this !) you can do, for fairer flowers than these — 
flowers that could bless you for having blessed them, 
and will love you for having loved them ; — flowers 
that have thoughts like yours, and lives like yours ; 
and which, once saved, you save forever? Is this 
only a little power ? Far among the moorlands and 
the rocks, — far in the darkness of the terrible streets, 
— these feeble florets are lying, with all their fresh 
leaves torn, and their stems broken — will you never 
go down to them, nor set them in order in their little 
fragrant beds, nor fence them, in their trembling, from 



96 SESAME AND LILIES. 

the fierce wind ? Shall morning follow morning, for 
you, but not for them ; and the dawn rise to watch, 
far away, those frantic Dances of Death ; 1 but no 
dawn rise to breathe upon these living banks of wild 
violet, and woodbine, and rose ; nor call to you, 
through your casement, — call (not giving you the 
name of the English poet's lady, but the name of 
Dante's great Matilda, who on the edge of happy 
Lethe, stood, wreathing flowers with flowers), say- 
ing, — 

" Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat, night, has flown, 
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad 
And the musk of the roses blown " ? 

Will you not go down among them ? — among those 
sweet living things, whose new courage, sprung from 
the earth with the deep color of heaven upon it, is 
starting up in strength of goodly spire ; and whose 
purity, washed from the dust, is opening, bud by bud, 
into the flower of promise ; — and still they turn to 
you and for you, " The Larkspur listens — I hear, I 
hear ! And the Lily whispers — I wait." 

95. Did you notice that I missed two lines when I 
read you that first stanza ; and think that I had for- 
gotten them ? Hear them now : — 

" Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat, night, has flown. 
Come into the garden, Maud, 
I am here at the gate alone." 

Who is it, think you, who stands at the gate of 
this sweeter garden, alone, waiting for you? Did 
you ever hear, not of a Maud, but a Madeleine, who 

1 See note, p. 43. 



//. OF QUEENS' GARDENS. 97 

went down to her garden in the dawn, and found One 
waiting at the gate, whom she supposed to be the 
gardener? Have you not sought Him often; sought 
Him in vain, all through the night ; sought Him in 
vain at the gate of that old garden where the fiery 
sword is set ? He is never there ; but at the gate of 
this garden He is waiting always — waiting to take 
your hand — ready to go down to see the fruits of the 
valley, to see whether the vine has flourished, and the 
pomegranate budded. There you shall see with Him 
the little tendrils of the vines that His hand is guid- 
ing — there you shall see the pomegranate springing 
where His hand cast the sanguine seed ; — more : you 
shall see the troops of the angel keepers that, with 
their wings, wave away the hungry birds from the 
pathsides where He has sown, and call to each other 
between the vineyard rows, " Take us the foxes, the 
little foxes, that spoil the vines, for our vines have 
tender grapes." Oh — you queens — you queens! 
among the hills and happy greenwood of this land of 
yours, shall the foxes have holes and the birds of the 
air have nests ; and in your cities shall the stones cry 
out against you, that they are the only pillows where 
the Son of Man can lay His head ? 






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